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‘Nine years after their meeting on a Vienna-bound train, Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy) meet again in Paris when Céline turns up at Jesse's book-signing at the famed Shakespeare and Company bookstore on the Left Bank. With Jesse's departure deadline looming over them, the two tentatively recreate their decade-earlier Viennese adventure as they stroll the Parisian boulevards, but the tone has definitively changed: the romantic idealism of innocence is now tempered with the regrets and sometimes bitter realizations of experience. Hawke, Delpy, and director Richard Linklater spent several years collaborating on the screenplay for this sequel to Before Sunrise, which is even richer than its predecessor in depicting the vicissitudes of real-world romance. Clear-eyed but not embittered, rueful but not despairing, witty, moving, and even suspenseful, Before Sunset is one of the best American films of the 2000s.’ Toronto International Film Festival