Before Midnight – 3

Not since My Dinner With Andre have I watched two such uninteresting characters talk so self-indulgently, often in complete paragraphs, to so little purpose. Julie Delpy came across as real, albeit neurotic, but Ethan Hawke was unconvincing as a novelist, as an expatriate, and certainly as a dad. When you watch a young couple courting, which is the subject of most movies as well as the excellent earlier installments of this saga, there is the easy payoff of consummation, with all that follows left to the imagination. Here, when we see similar exchanges – what, seven years into the marriage? – there is no payoff. This will go on forever, which is what it felt like watching.