Critical reception
What rating did Kemp give?
Before Midnight (film)
Like its two predecessors, "Before Midnight" received widespread critical acclaim. Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a score of 98% based on reviews from 172 critics, with an average rating of 8.7/10. The site's consensus is: "Building on the first two installments in Richard Linklater's well-crafted Before trilogy, "Before Midnight" offers intelligent, powerfully acted perspectives on love, marriage, and long-term commitment." Metacritic gives the film a score of 94 based on reviews from 41 critics, indicating "universal acclaim". It was listed as the third best film of the year after "12 Years a Slave" and "Gravity". It was the second best reviewed film of 2013 according to Rotten Tomatoes, after Alfonso Cuarón's "Gravity". According to Total Film's Philip Kemp, "As with its two predecessors—and with the films of French New Wave director Éric Rohmer, presiding deity of this kind of cinema—"Midnight"'s essentially a film about people talking. But when the talk's this good, this absorbing and revealing and witty and true, who's going to complain?" Kemp gave the film five out of five stars and called it 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. "Perry Seibert of AllMovie also praised the film, writing: "The screenwriting trio fill the movie with long, discursive conversations (there are only two scenes in the first 20 minutes) that feel utterly improvised when they are performed, but are far too deftly structured to be anything other than the work of consummate artists." Eric Kohn, from "Indiewire", gave the film rave reviews, adding it to his list of Top 10 Films of 2013. He wrote that "With "Before Midnight", Richard Linklater has completed one of the finest movie trilogies of all time."