97% Before Midnight

All Critics (72) | Top Critics (26) | Fresh (69) | Rotten (2)

This one is a slowly evolving quarrel between two people who know each other inside out, delivered with the same intelligence and discernment but, as you might imagine, something of a cold shower.

Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy are both fine actors, but you'd be hard pressed to sit engrossed in a conversation between any actors that goes on for more than a couple of minutes. Usually. But not here.

Linklater and his actors expose small fissures with an admirable subtlety.

What Linklater, Delpy and Hawke have achieved with their trilogy is at once fluidly cinematic and novelistic, with stories behind the stories and possible endings beyond the endings we're given.

The Before series has steadily gotten better as it goes along, which is more than any but the most optimistic among us dare to hope for from love.

Before Midnight is the fullest and richest and saddest of the three movies in the trilogy.

We're happy to go along for the ride.

Think of it, in the best way possible, as an intellectual's midlife crisis movie, which resonates all the more because we've known them - and aged along with them - for the last 18 years.

If [these characters are] less honest with each other, the film is, in turn, more honest about them.

Lacks the sweeping romanticism of "Before Sunrise," replaced by the realities of one's day-to-day existence in a world where things don't always turn out the way one imagines, or hopes. Such is life.

With this series, each film deepens the meaning and sensibility of the story so that now, as one whole, they are one of the most romantic stories in the history of film.

As witty and charming as ever, with a healthy raw dose of a marriage in trouble

Their discussions have the rhythm of real life, as likely to generate nods of recognition from couples in the audience as start a fight between them on the way home.

Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy come off as if they were conjoined for the past nine years in the gloriously-acted, hypnotically-conversational conclusion to the Before Sunrise trilogy -- the year's first legit contender for awards season love.

The last 40 minutes consisting of acute, sharp, and biting dialogue reminiscent of 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf' make sitting through the excruciating first hour worth it.

Brilliant, mature third chapter to heartfelt romantic saga.

Truth is beauty, and beauty truth, but they're not necessarily romantic nine years into a serious committed relationship with two kids in the backseat.

No matter how long the gap between movies has been or how completely the characters' lives have changed, when Jesse and Celine turn to each other and start one of their famously epic conversations, it feels like no time has passed at all.

A life-affirming, emotionally captivating and rewarding experience. It treats the audience like sophisticated, mature adults---a demographic that has been sorely neglected by Hollywood nowadays.

Source: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/before_midnight_2013/

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