With that said, there’s little point even trying to pretend that I didn’t go into Before Midnight yearning, aching for it to be brilliant. Richard Linklater’s previous two films in the series, Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, are both flat-out five star pieces of cinema for me. As someone usually averse to the overly romantic or love stories, I was utterly swept up in the initial burgeoning relationship between Ethan Hawke’s Jesse and Julie Delpy’s Celine, a screen couple who felt real, and felt like grown-ups. And I thought it fair to declare these thoughts from the off. Because, in truth, if you come to Before Midnight having not seen the first two, it surely loses something. It just has to. A lot, potentially. That score you see at the bottom then is firmly for those who have been on board to this point. If you haven’t been, get hold of Before Sunrise, and prepare to be charmed. If you have? This might just be your film of the year. It’s certainly mine so far. Before Midnight, then, is the slightly more melancholy third chapter in the story of Jesse and Celine. Here’s where real life has taken a grip on them. At the start, we meet Jesse (Hawke) in conversation with his son, just before the latter boards a flight back to America to be with his mother. Jesse and Celine (Delpy) themselves, meanwhile, are staying in Greece, and have twin girls of their own. And their life has no shortage of complications, as this is the film where the reality of a long term relationship has firmly hit. It’s not quite ‘be careful what you wish for’, but it’s certainly a relationship now with warts and all that we get to spend time with. Jesse and Celine’s exchanges, then, pass screen time in a blink. They talk about their children, about parental guilt. They touch on they feelings for each other, their respective foibles. In some cases, they talk trivia, but trivia with resonance. The connection is clearly still there – and Hawke and Delpy are quite brilliant – but time has clearly taken the sheen off things a little. Furthermore, the non-verbal ticks are equally meaningful, making the pair all the more convincing. There are the same doses of playfulness, just tinged with a bit more regret, a dab of hurt, and a feeling of a couple at a crossroads, whose relationship has no shortage of vulnerabilities to it. Refreshingly, they talk in conversations too, rather than speeches. And so when you get a moment where Hawke talks about “game day”, which I won’t spoil here, it’s all the more impactful. Several times, a simple turn in a piece of dialogue here and there feels so much more important than any massive plot twist could have ever conjured. If it does stop at three, though, then Linklater, Delpy and Hawke have fashioned one of the best and most convincing trilogies in cinema history. Because Before Midnight is just wonderful. Now if only more cinemas would show the bloody thing… With thanks to Cineworld Broad Street in Birmingham Please, if you can, support our charity horror stories ebook, Den Of Eek!, raising money for Geeks Vs Cancer. Details here.