Before Sunset (2004) Review

"I remember that night better than entire years."

"Memory is a wonderful thing if you don't have to deal with the past."

It's a movie about growing up (which all happens off-screen) and trying to move on, but ultimately not about moving on (which very much happens on-screen).

The idea of following his actor's aging through the same role in 'real time' is obviously a sort of trick of director Richard Linklater at this point, even if he waits 'til later on to deploy it in an even more concentrated form in 2014's Boyhood.

I wonder how different the experience of taking in these movies as they were released differs from watching them as a set in the same calendar month. Obviously, you're dipping back into the lives of the two main characters with purer sympathy if you watched the Before trilogy in 1995, 2004, and 2013; as they age so too do you, in those 9-year increments.

But there's a certain power to in the smash-cut bluntness of my personal binge-watch approach, you can see the weight of the years even clearer, your memory of these days is somehow even sharper than theirs' is.