Before Midnight: 10/10

The ultimate goal of the storyteller is to leave the listener or listeners thirsty for more.

Before Midnight accomplishes just this, and for the third time in the indie darling series.

This dramatically beautiful film follows the lives of two characters that avid moviegoers have come to know about and love for the past two decades. Taking place nine years after the spectacular Before Sunset, Before Midnight is exactly what it looks like when a magical love story's happily ever after begins to show its age. It doesn't have the majesty or the warmth of the previous two movies, as it's instead infused with brutal realism and a more conflicting blend of optimism and pessimism.

Written by the same trio of Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke and the great director Richard Linklater, this third installment continues using the same formula of excellent dialogue and whimsical cinematography combined with flawless acting. Ethan Hawke's best performances have come from this series, as he combines confidence with fragile hidden vulnerability in a way that delivers nothing but sympathy from the audience. And then there's Julie Delpy, whose subtle angst is mixed with an incredible dosage of charm and sexuality that you just won't find in most actresses modern day. They both deserve Oscar nominations, they honestly do.

Breathing life into the performances that transforms these characters into seemingly living and breathing people is the breathtaking writing, which never feels forced, never feels sugar-coated, and never feels like it was written first but instead spoken first and then translated into a script. And to top it off we have an accomplished director that has spent nearly two decades making this trilogy giving the movie all the necessary pacing, minimal movement, and breathing room to keep us engaged.

In all honesty, I usually can't do films that just focus on dialogue and nothing more. But with the right characters, the right story, and the ability to keep you engaged, keep you guessing, keeps you begging for more, even a simple movie about two people in love just talking can become the most beautiful of films. And Linklater has done it three times with the same two characters—and this will become one of the most underrated accomplishments in the history of motion pictures, I can guarantee it.

Before Midnight will make you laugh, will make you cry, will make you think, will make you frustrated, and will leave you discussing everything that you had just witnessed in the previous 108 minutes. And this is why this movie will stand tall as one of the best in this entire year.