Latest news with #BeforeSunrise
Daily Mirror
21-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
'Best chemistry ever' in 'charming' film with 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating
Before Sunrise, starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, is the first film in the Before trilogy and has become synonymous with love and romance over the years Director Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise, the inaugural film of the acclaimed Before trilogy, is often hailed as the quintessence of romantic cinema by enthusiasts. The 1995 romantic drama, penned by Linklater and Kim Krizan, features Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in a captivating lead duo. Set against the picturesque backdrop of Vienna, the film chronicles the fleeting connection between two strangers over the course of an evening as they meander through the city. Drawing from his personal life, Linklater is said to have modelled the story on a night he spent roaming Philadelphia with a woman. The casting of Hawke and Delpy as the protagonists was a meticulous process that spanned nine months. The narrative continued with Before Sunset in 2004 and concluded with Before Midnight in 2013, cementing the trilogy's status as a touchstone for cinematic romance. Julie Delpy shared insights into her creative input during a Guardian interview: "Richard, Ethan and I produced the script together, though Ethan and I weren't credited for Before Sunrise. The process was totally collaborative: all three of us had to agree on ideas for scenes. That's how we did Before Sunset and Before Midnight, too. If one of us hated something, it wouldn't make the film. From the start, those guys wanted the balance of a proper female voice.", reports the Express. Before Sunrise has not only won over critics, securing a flawless 100 per cent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but also charmed viewers, boasting an impressive 93 per cent audience score. One critic hailed the film as "utterly charming", while another was captivated by its subtle magic: "The charm - the midsummer enchantment - never feels forced; it steals up and wins you. A true romance." Another reviewer declared it "undoubtedly one of the most romantic movies of all time", with yet another adding: "There are so many perfect moments in this film; it is hard to list them without excluding others." Director Richard Linklater received heaps of praise, with a critic noting: "Seemingly improvised and entirely natural but still structured and splendidly directed by writer Richard Linklater." The lead actors also received high acclaim for their captivating performances: "Hawke and Delpy keep the tone not only afloat but mesmerising. So natural are their performances that it seems impossible not to believe they truly are soulmates who are locked in a doomed, all-too-short affair." In a candid 2022 interview with The Independent, Ethan Hawke reflected on his deep connection to the film, stating: "There's a lot of myself and my reality in those movies [the Before trilogy]. They're as deeply connected to me as anything could be. I can't look at Before Sunrise now without remembering, so vividly, that time period. Who I was then is so different from who I am now; it's difficult for me to watch it and exorcise it from my actual life." One fan was utterly captivated by the film, awarding it top marks and sharing: "10/10. I wanted to focus on the incredible love story that is Before Sunrise. Richard Linklater found a special energy and aura when creating this masterpiece. There is something so beautiful and honest with this film. I can't explain it, and neither can anyone who's ever watched this film." Another viewer was equally impressed, stating: "Nothing else quite catches the true essence of romance like Before Sunrise did." An audience review concurred with the high praise, declaring: "Definitely the best romance movie of all time." The lead actors' connection also drew admiration, with another fan expressing: "Ethan Hawke and Julie Dehpy have maybe the best chemistry in a movie I have ever seen, it all feels so natural. The direction is incredible, the script is one of the best I have ever seen, the city feels like a person and the locations are beautiful, but still grounded." For those looking to experience the magic themselves, Before Sunrise is available for rent on Apple TV+ and Amazon Prime Video at £3.49.
The Hindu
17-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
Off-side: The grey zone of greatness
As the sun sank at Lord's in a haze of tired white flannel and sweat, Zak Crawley, as if auditioning for Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise, wandered off twice before Jasprit Bumrah could bowl. He then called for the physio after a glancing blow to the glove. And one over quietly disappeared into the English dusk. The host walked off with 10 wickets intact, and Shubman Gill, visibly frustrated, offered a round of sarcastic applause. What Crawley did was gamesmanship. A performance with just enough ambiguity to avoid a reprimand. The next day, Akash Deep — tailender, rookie, and possibly hoping for the same Oscar nomination — tried the same trick. He gestured for attention, stalled for time, and hoped to escape one last over from Ben Stokes. But unlike Crawley, he failed. The England captain ended his brief stay at the crease, leaving India at 58/4 going into the last day of a fascinating Test match. This was sport's legal grey zone — a space full of performative cramps and raised eyebrows. While sportsmanship is about fairness and restraint, gamesmanship is essentially its sly twin — rule-abiding on the surface, but underneath, just petty opportunism and loophole hunting. Crawley's act — or Glove Gate — danced on that tightrope. Unsportsmanlike behaviour, though, is something else. It's Dennis Lillee kicking Javed Miandad, Trevor Chappell bowling underarm to stop a six. It's Diego Maradona's 'Hand of God' goal at the 1986 World Cup. In tennis, Novak Djokovic is the unofficial king of strategic disruption. He has taken medical timeouts mid-match, often when losing, sparking accusations of gamesmanship. During the Wimbledon quarterfinal against Jannik Sinner in 2022, Djokovic, two sets down, vanished for a bathroom break and came back a different player. He won in five sets and went on to clinch his seventh All England title. A 2021 Wall Street Journal analysis found Djokovic wins 83.3 per cent of sets — 10 out of 12 since 2013 — immediately after bathroom breaks. It's higher than his overall career set winning percentage at Grand Slams (78.6). The ATP, in 2022, implemented stricter regulations, limiting players to one break per match for a maximum of three minutes (plus an additional two minutes for changing clothes), and only at the end of a set. What Crawley and Djokovic share is the ability to game the structure — not break it, just bend it to suit their end. And so, we arrive at the dilemma: is sporting greatness just measured in numbers — 24 Grand Slams, a Test hundred, a final-day escape. Or do we factor in the way they navigate the in-betweens? The pauses. The loopholes. The moral shade of performance. Do we love our champions for what they win, or how they win it? That, perhaps, is the loneliest line in all of sport. Not the crease or the baseline, but the one between winning, and winning good.
Time Magazine
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Magazine
Too Much's Enchanting Tribute to 'Before Sunrise' Is the Best Episode of the Series
According to the digital clock on Jessica's bedside table, it's just after 9:07 p.m. on a weekday evening when she issues a warning to Felix: 'I can't stay up late tonight.' Jess (Megan Stalter) has an important meeting at 8:30 the next morning. And the new couple, whose romance is chronicled in the Netflix series Too Much, has gotten into the habit of lingering together through the wee hours, to the extent that her new boss (Richard E. Grant) has noticed her struggling at work. But the first flush of love is a potent force. In the third—and, in my estimation, best—episode of the season, we watch it overpower our heroine's more prudent impulses. A genre-savvy, meta romantic comedy in the tradition of Emily Henry's novels and the best of Nora Ephron, Too Much, from co-creators Lena Dunham and Luis Felber, visualizes Jess' Wuthering Heights fantasies and features a scene in which her family dissects Alan Rickman's sex appeal in Sense and Sensibility. Each episode's title is a spin on the name of a classic silver-screen romance. That this particular chapter of Jess and Felix's (Will Sharpe) love story is called 'Ignore Sunrise'—a reference to Richard Linklater's gorgeous indie touchstone Before Sunrise, released in 1995—serves as the first clue that it's doing something special. The first feature in what would become a trilogy spanning two decades, Before Sunrise follows two devastatingly attractive, 20-something strangers, Ethan Hawke's Jesse and Julie Delpy's Céline, who meet on a train and, after an electric first chat, decide to disembark together in Vienna. He's an aimless, idealistic American; she's a blunter, more skeptical Frenchwoman studying at the Sorbonne. Jesse has a plane to catch the next morning but can't afford a hotel room, so they wander the cobblestone streets and haunt cafes, falling hard for each other as afternoon fades into evening and night yields to, yes, sunrise. Though the liaison is eventually consummated, it's the conversation between Céline and Jesse that kindles their love. With disarming honesty, they discuss philosophy, art, and memory, filtering their ideas through personal anecdotes as they grow more connected with each searching exchange. When they separate, less than 24 hours after meeting and with only the vaguest reunion plans, it's unclear whether these two lovers, who seem so perfectly matched, will ever see each other again. Though it's situated within the arc of a longer, in some ways more conventional romance, 'Ignore Sunrise' pays tribute to Linklater's film by pausing the show's plot to luxuriate in what becomes, despite Jess' intentions, a sleepless night. (It also reminded me of the standout Girls episode 'One Man's Trash,' which unfolds over the course of a weekend-long fling between Dunham's Hannah and an older man played by Patrick Wilson.) Periodic shots of the digital clock punctuate the passing of time—11:02, 1:11, 2:36, 4:03, 5:07—as she and Felix move from room to room in her shabby sublet. He makes pho in the kitchen, and they make out on the floor. They watch Paddington, one of his favorite movies, in the living room and hook up on the couch. In the bedroom they banter about her habit of falling asleep to true crime documentaries ('Murder is relaxing to you?' he marvels). They can't even keep their hands off each other in the bathroom, while she's brushing her teeth. The episode ends with the buzz of the alarm at 6:45 a.m., as Jess shovels cold pho into her mouth in preparation for another exhausted workday. Like Jesse and Céline, Jess and Felix are, respectively, an American abroad and an old soul from across the Atlantic. (Might Jess' name be a callback to Hawke's character? Totally possible I'm overthinking this.) And their conversations are similarly revealing. 'Isn't adulthood just a series of things we don't want to do but we have to?' Jess asks as she pores over a budget document, working after hours to prove she's a valuable employee. 'No,' replies Felix, who's struggling to support himself as a session musician and has just come from a frustrating visit to the employment office. 'I think it's, like, trying to make sure you can do the things you actually want to do.' When he asks if what she's working on is what she always wanted to do with her life, she hedges: 'It's similar to what I really wanted to do.' We see how she could use a dose of his idealism about creative pursuits, just as he could stand to absorb some of her work ethic. They delve into their pasts. There are flashbacks to Jess' childhood with a father she adored, who died young of an aggressive form of Parkinson's. Now three years sober, Felix tells her about his 'rock bottom' and the realization that the substance abuse that was part of his rock 'n' roll lifestyle was actually keeping him from writing good music. His insights into who she is can be breathtaking. He likens Jess, who traveled to London with a broken heart, to the orphaned Paddington, wandering through the city with an invisible tag that reads: 'Please look after this girl.' He observes, 'You're not always that kind to yourself,' undervaluing her own comfort. But 'Ignore Sunrise' does diverge from Before Sunrise in ways that feel crucial to the more honest, self-aware romance Dunham and Felber seem intent on creating in Too Much. There is a sheen of poetic perfection to the film; Jesse and Céline are idealized lovers who look like grunge-era fashion models and speak with an unguarded openness. Jess and Felix, by contrast, are real, funny, messy, horny, flawed people. ('I've always actually felt really hot,' she says at one point, debriefing after an abortive attempt at their umpteenth sexual encounter of the night. 'Except for when I haven't'—an inevitability, she explains, in a society that lets every woman who isn't supermodel material know it.) They're frank about their bodies: 'I have to go to the bathroom,' she says after sex, 'because I'm not about that UTI life.' Grossing each other out is part of their love language. 'There was one time I went on a bender and had sex with my sister…'s friend,' Felix says, teasing Jess with a long pause that implies he committed incest. Dunham, who wrote and directed the episode, also seeds their interactions with the distractions, evasions, and half-truths of two people with baggage who aren't yet comfortable baring their whole souls. Dating Felix hasn't stopped Jess from obsessing over her ex, Zev (Michael Zegen), and his new fiancée, Wendy (Emily Ratajkowski). She sneaks glances at their social media and flashes back to nights in bed with Zev. One fantasy sequence imagines Jess and Wendy bonding at a Grease-style sleepover, then seducing each other in a red-lit erotic thriller. Even in the middle of an idyllic night with her new boyfriend, Jess is too stuck in her recent past to be entirely present. Because Too Much is filtered mostly through her perspective, it will take some time for viewers to discover everything that's competing with Jess for Felix's attention—though in one telling moment, she asks him about his family and he ever-so-gently changes the subject. There's an irony to 'Ignore Sunrise,' too. Felix is perceptive enough to notice that Jess is too quick to discount her own comfort. But he doesn't seem to notice, as he stays in bed to enjoy the daytime sleep of the underemployed while she gets up to prepare for her meeting, that this night, as wonderful as it was, is another example of that self-sacrificing tendency. One about which he should, perhaps, be aware and concerned enough not to become complicit. There's a fine line between compatibility and codependency, having compassion for another person's failings and enabling them. The episode's uneasy conclusion foreshadows the many obstacles, habits, and hangups the couple must tackle on the road to long-term happiness—something Linklater's movie never has to consider (though its equally superb sequels do, in great depth). If Before Sunrise updated the high romance of fairy tales for the '90s bohemian, then Too Much is grounded in real-life relationships (Dunham and Felber's, for one), disrupted as they are by UTIs and family trauma and intrusive thoughts of heartbreaks past. Yet the movie's influence on the show is wonderfully apparent in the core theme they share—a conviction that the effort to communicate across the yawning void that separates individual consciousnesses is the ultimate act of love. 'If there's any kind of magic in this world,' Céline, the realist, proposes to Jesse, 'it must be in the attempt of understanding someone sharing something.' It's an observation you can imagine Jess and Felix mulling, too, alone together in the fragile quiet before sunrise.
Hindustan Times
20-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Every romance movie tries to hack love. Here's why it doesn't work IRL
Romance movies will have you believe that love is a shiny, fragile thing that can be distilled down to one great metaphor. Think of your favourite romcom. You can probably recall the line that made it famous; the piece of wisdom that, the movie promises, will change everything we know about love. Let's call it, for lack of a better term, the Love Hack. Audiences measure their relationships against it. It shows up in Insta Reels and Reddit compilations of the best relationship advice of all time. Every generation has their own. And it's probably ruining more relationships than it saves. Because a Love Hack rarely works in the real world. And even the fictional world is starting to wise up. In To All The Boys I've Loved Before (2018), Lara Jean comes to realise that love isn't how it's described in the movies; 'it's better because it's real'. So, what is love? Oh, we're not offering a hack of our own. But here's what the movies get wrong. 'Love means never having to say you're sorry.' Love Story (1970) Excuse me, what? Anyone in a real relationship will tell you that you spend half of it apologising, and the other half being apologised to. In the movie, Ali MacGraw's character says it to Ryan O'Neal's character, after he apologises for his anger. Tsk tsk. That moment certainly needed an apology. And in subsequent interviews, MacGraw herself has disagreed with the line, calling it 'crock'. Couples fight; disagreement is part of love. Saying sorry means you're a grown-up, that you acknowledge the effect your words or actions have had on another person, regardless of intention. A whole generation of Love Story watchers skipped this. We don't have to. Cutting up fruit or moving onto the next topic as if nothing really happened just means you'll land up in couples' therapy later. 'When you realise you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.' When Harry Met Sally (1989) Sounds wholesome. But is this really a test of love? For Harry and Sally, who spend their adult lives crossing each other's paths without realising that they should be together, it's a neat little conclusion. For everyone else, not so much. Remember when Geet left her whole family behind in Jab We Met, and fled home to start a new life with Anshuman? Bad idea. Besides, research shows that taking your time and marrying later leads to better, longer-lasting relationships. Also, marriage? In this economy? Who are you, a 20-something influencer with generational wealth? 'I think I can really fall in love when I know everything about someone.' Before Sunrise (1995) You know we'd come for this line. In the movie, Celine tells Jesse that knowing the mundane things about a person makes you fall for them: 'The way he's going to part his hair, which shirt he's going to wear that day, knowing the exact story he'd tell in a given situation'. Celine, ma cheri, you've got it backwards. Leave the tedious detail for after. No point seeing someone drool in their sleep, get petty with relatives and leave dishes 'soaking' in the sink right from the start. Even in the most long-lasting relationship, it's good to not know everything about your partner. It keeps the mystery alive. 'Love is passion, obsession, someone you can't live without.' Meet Joe Black (1998) Oh dear! How to hate on Brad Pitt, in his prime, playing Death? This line, thankfully, comes from Anthony Hopkins's character, who believes that his daughter is settling for a tepid partner (and not Brad Pitt)! But this is a dangerous pop-culture myth. If your entire relationship feels like a burning, fiery dance of emotion, chances are it will combust soon. Slow-burn love – showing up when they're sick, doing the dishes, listening to the same stories for the 16th time – doesn't fuel summer blockbusters. But it's the real test. 'You don't marry someone you can live with, you marry the person you cannot live without.' P.S. I Love You (2007) First of all, this is confusing. Unpack it a bit and you'll realise that both mean the same thing – that the person you cannot live without is ultimately the person you should live with. But that takes learning too. Also, it reeks of co-dependent behaviour. The person you should first learn to live with is you. And if you can't live without someone, maybe you're not ready to be a fully functioning adult yet. The Four Question Theory: 'Is he kind? Can I tell him everything in my heart? Does he help me become the best version of myself? Can I imagine him as the father of my children?' The Life List (2025) Four hacks for the price of one. When the Sofia Carson starrer came out, there were reports of couples feeling dissatisfied with their own love stories. Some even broke up because their relationships didn't pass the four question test. (Maybe they were low-key looking for an excuse to quit). PR gimmicks aside, it's too much of a quick-fix. An entire relationship can't be summed up in four questions. And besides, the fourth one is hardly inclusive. What if you can't see him/her as the parent of your child because you don't want to have kids in the first place? From HT Brunch, June 21, 2025 Follow us on
Spectator
04-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Literate and sensitive romance: Falling Into Place reviewed
Falling Into Place is a love story written by Aylin Tezel, directed by Aylin Tezel, and starring Aylin Tezel. That's a lot of Aylin Tezel so I was nervous going in. What if it's too much Aylin Tezel? What if Aylin Tezel and I don't get along? Who even is Aylin Tezel? But I knew within the first few minutes we were in safe hands and I was set to like this Aylin Tezel. In Falling Into Place she's created a literate and sensitive romance that is allowed to unfold gently. If it's 'high-octane action' you're after, then your better bet this week is Ballerina, the John Wick spin-off. This is strictly for the low-octane crowd. Do not expect octane. The film opens on a wintry Isle of Skye where Kira (Tezel, who is famous as an actress in her native Germany, I now know) has decamped for the weekend. So, too, has Ian (Chris Fulton). He's come to visit his troubled family. Kira had booked into a B&B with her boyfriend but he's just dumped her and now she's here alone. There's a spark from the moment they first lock eyes across a crowded pub bar. They spend the night together but it's one of those Before Sunrise nights. That is, a night of connection rather than consummation even though the sexual attraction is strong. They lark about in the dark streets, their conversation sometimes daft, sometimes existential. Tezel writes, directs, stars and looks adorable in a little woolly hat – is there no end to her talent? – which, thankfully, she never pairs with a pastel-coloured cardie as would have to happen if this were a romcom.
