98% Before Midnight

All Critics (100) | Top Critics (34) | Fresh (97) | Rotten (2)

Before Midnight is fascinating to watch, and so long as Celine and Jesse are communicating, there's still hope.

How (Jesse and Celine) try to rekindle that flame is what drives Midnight, a film that feels so authentic it's like overhearing a conversation you're not sure you should be hearing.

Having created and aged into their characters, both Delpy and Hawke are superb at doing what professional actors find so difficult - not seeming to act.

Offers a remarkably intimate and provocative study of a marriage.

Lovely. Insightful. Sad. Funny.

If the first two films belong with the greatest (if talkiest) movie romances of all time, the new film is richer, riskier, and more bleakly perceptive about what it takes for love to endure (or not) over the long haul.

A Bracing Look at the Realities if Lovve

... everyone who saw Before Sunset in a theater has deeply held secrets and lies barely covered beneath the surface. Before Midnight dissects the moment when, under the right conditions, those subterranean flammables combust ...

A more-than-worthy, expectations-exceeding chapter in one of modern cinema's finest love stories. As honest, convincing, funny, intimate and natural as its predecessors.

Before Midnight is as wondrous as sequels get; a warm and winning addition to a saga I'm now hoping continues in perpetuity.

A fictional, romantic version of the British "Up" series and a unique collaboration between actors and director.

Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy shine in what has to be the most genuine, brutally honest, and romantic tale of love in all of film history. Linklater has made a crowning achievement!

The problem I have...is that the actors are so comfortable in their roles, the cease to be real.

Not since the 1950s, and movies such as The Best Years of Our Lives, have we seen such an adult treatment of long-term relationships in American cinema, all of which makes Before Midnight as refreshing as it is smart, and as bold as love itself.

From moment to moment, the concerns of this frank and funny movie seem small, but the subject proves to be love, the biggest one of all.

The conclusion of a trilogy that...has subtly depicted the birth, growth and maturation of a man-woman relationship with its inevitable vacillations between affection, sacrifice, self-concern and acrimony.

Linklater makes use of unshowy direction and natural improvisation from his leads, who both get co-writing credits, creating a remarkably unforced picture of love kindled and rekindled.

It's not that Delpy and Hawke don't have the chemistry, they're terrific together, but their overemphatic ways feel false in a film that's endeavoring for realism.

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

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