Before Midnight

The latest in the wonderful "Before" series does three important things: It breaks out of the courtship formula, yet retains the series' quality, and it moves the lives of Celine (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke) forward in ways that are satisfying and believable. True, a romance you once envied might now be a relationship you'd not want to be in, but as long as Celine and Jesse are still talking, there's hope.

What follows is astounding: a thirty-minute fight, which, in its bitterness, complication, and psychological revelation, recalls episodes from Ingmar Bergman's "Scenes from a Marriage." [27 May 2013, p.86]

Before Midnight is a wonderful paradox: a movie passionately committed to the ideal of imperfection that is itself very close to perfect.

Before Midnight manages to be an emotionally astute and tremendously enjoyable conclusion to this rather improbable trilogy.

The film is far from a downer. If anything, more than any of the films in the trilogy, this one may be the most hopeful - and the most affecting.

Not only is the result edifying, but it's also rewarding. And it's a heck of a lot cheaper than a therapy session.

Luckily, Hawke and Delpy remain as charming as ever, and their combined goofiness is more endearing than annoying. Winning, too, is the sense that this peculiar project, though imperfect, could grow old with its audience and its cast.

This is a great film. This is a great film. This is a great film. This is a great film.

The "Before" series tells the story of a couple that talks, and talks, and **** talks. In Before Sunrise, Jesse and Celine meet on a train across Europe, and spend the night getting to know each other as they take a romantic walk through Vienna and engage in charming dialogue. In Before Sunset, they reconnect in Paris nine years later, engage in more charming dialogue, and are a couple by the end of the film. In Before Midnight, nine years have passed again, and Jesse and Celine are now a middle-aged couple with twin girls and a lot of relationship baggage - mostly centered around Jesse's son and his ex-wife. They still talk endlessly, but all the chatter has lost its charm. They talk their way through a sunset, talk their way through foreplay, and finally talk themselves into a big fight. Celine walks out of the room twice in one scene, immediately returning, I assume, because the not talking was killing her. If there is ever a fourth entry to the series, I hope Jesse and Celine have learned that they need to **** now and then, that sometimes silence is golden.

Warning to people that are going to watch this, it is much better if you have watched the first two. This movie is all dialogue and I mean every single bit and the scenes are excruciatingly long but in the end this movie shows the true side of marriage and shows how difficult it can really be. I would give this a 58.9/100 mostly due to the fact that the pacing was slow.

The final scene of this trilogy was worthwhile. It was thoughtful, reflective and heartwarming. In my opinion the remainder of the trilogy (i.e. all three movies) didn't amount to much more than a record of some very plain conversations, which rarely offered any useful or unusual insights into human relationships.

The film my be acclaimed by critics, however I found it boring and unsubstantial. More importantly, the story includes a fragment that with total lack of good taste insults Jesus and people in the Christian faith. It was at that point, that after many yawnings, my wife and I decided to stop watching. It was around 45-50 minutes of our time lost, among other things, in non-sense, taste-less sex chatters.