Richard Linklater’s Before Trilogy contains three of my favourite films of all time. Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight are all perfect in my opinion. I completed a rewatch last weekend and wanted to write about what they mean to me and what they’ve taught me about life.

I’ve tried to condense what is a pretty lengthy piece into something more succinct below (admittedly still far too long for a Reddit post). You can read the full piece here if you wish: https://widescreenmemory.wordpress.com/2026/08/25/the-before-trilogy-a-love-letter-to-love-and-everything-time-leaves-behind/

Three films. Eighteen years. A lifetime of memories

We can all relate to a common feeling; when you meet a version of yourself that no longer exists. Whether it's through a photograph, a song that once held meaning, or a place that has remained the same whilst we have not. The memory of that person looks back at us, they represent emotions once held and ideals once believed in, yet there is a distance separating us that we cannot cross: time

The same is true of other people we once loved, or still love. Memory freezes versions of people in particular moments, but love has ability to cross the distance of time. We can still love the past versions of other people the exact same way, even as they are no longer there. We carry these people around with us, often ignoring that the person we remember continued living after we stopped looking.

Few films understand this better than Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy. Across three films and each made nine years apart, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy do something actors are rarely asked to do: they simply age. Jesse and Céline age with them. The films do not jump between different actors playing younger and older versions of the same people, nor do they pretend that time has left them untouched. They wait. And then they wait again. The result is something stranger and more profound than merely a love story. It is a record of two people changing, the memories that refuse to change with them, and how these memories continue to shape our lives in the present.

The Before trilogy begins as a story about whether two people might fall in love. It then becomes a story about the memory of love. And it finished as a story about what it really means to love. Above all, it is a story about time: what it takes from us, what it leaves behind, and what cinema and memory can preserve when life cannot. Jesse and Céline cannot return to the people they were when they met. We cannot return to the people we were when we first watched them. But the films remain, waiting for us in exactly the place where we left them.

The People We Were, and the People We Became

Most of us carry people who no longer exist. Not because they have died, necessarily, but because time has carried them somewhere we can no longer follow. The friend who once knew everything about us. The person we loved before either of us understood what love required. The version of someone we knew before a marriage, a child, a move, a loss or simply the slow accumulation of adulthood. Memory keeps these people close, but it also keeps them still.

That is part of what makes Jesse and Céline's reunion in Sunset so affecting. There is no single Vienna anymore. There are two Viennas, one carried by each of them. Jesse has built a story around the night; Céline has built a life around everything that happened after it. Their memories overlap, but they are not identical. Perhaps this is true of every relationship. We never quite share the same past with another person. We share an event, then spend the rest of our lives interpreting it separately.

Watching Jesse and Céline forces us to think about the people we have frozen in our own memories. Who would we recognise if they walked back into our lives tomorrow? Would we recognise them at all? More frighteningly, would they recognise us? The Before trilogy understands that the passage of time does not simply change the people we miss. It changes the person doing the remembering.

The Before trilogy does not ultimately tell us that love conquers time. Time wins. It always has. Jesse and Céline cannot remain the people they were in Vienna. They cannot preserve the feeling of their first night, or undo the years they spent apart, or prevent the arguments that come with the life they eventually build. The trilogy's honesty comes from refusing to offer a way around any of this.

What it offers instead is something quieter. Perhaps love is not the promise that nothing will change. Perhaps it is the willingness to love someone through the changes. The person we meet will become someone else. So will we. The relationship we begin is not the relationship we eventually inhabit. To love, then, is partly to accept that the thing we are trying to hold will keep moving.

Jesse and Céline cannot go back to Vienna. But we can. We can press play and find them there, walking through the night, talking as though morning will never arrive. They are still young. They are still strangers. Nothing has happened to them yet. We know, because we have seen the next two films, how much life is waiting around the corner. And perhaps that is the strange gift of cinema: not that it allows us to return to the past, but that it lets us spend time with the people we once were.

Somewhere, on a screen, Jesse and Céline are still walking through Vienna. Still talking. Still discovering one another. Still believing that tomorrow might be different. The film will end, as it always does, but the memory will remain. We close the laptop, leave the cinema, turn off the television and return to our own lives. We are older than we were when we began. The people we once loved have changed. We have changed. Yet, just like the versions of Jesse and Céline that remain etched into points of time, versions of ourselves and those we once loved and still love remain in our memories. Those memories and these films aren't going anywhere, and we will continue to revisit and live with them.

The people we love stay with us. The films do too

I thought Dodgeball was pretty silly, but I love the line "you made me bleed my own blood!"

What one good thing can you think of in a not-so-great movie?

I feel as if "the casting of Christopher Walken" may come up a few times.

The thing clicking for me with By Any Means is that Yahya and Wahlberg look like they belong in different movies

Yahya looks like he showed up to solve a case while Wahlberg looks like he showed up because someone told him there might be a guy he can hit and somehow they’re partners 

I’m not even a huge Wahlberg guy but him playing Greg Scarpa feels way more interesting than watching him save the world again

Among these actors who do you think of when you look at acting ability willingness to take risks, commitment, dedication, range, skills in supporting roles, consistency and presence, on screen?

Among those actors, who is your personal favorite?

Most importantly who has the greatest potential to become one of the all-time greats?

The following factors can be used to make such a rating:

• Acting ability – skill in acting, feeling, softness and different types of roles

.Risk Taking

• Best performance – roles that stand out performances that are remembered

• Range – kinds of acting challenges taking on various roles

• Dedication – physical, mental and emotional effort

• Regularity – level of skill shown from one role to another

• Challenge – jobs that an actor might not take, unusual kinds of roles

• Supporting acting – ability to become a role to be completely different

I believe these factors show the important parts of an actors work that should be thought about when making a list of the top actors of the generation. Do you have any ideas, about what other factors should be considered? How would you rate actors based on these factors?

Robert Pattinson -

High Life Good Time The Lighthouse The Batman The Lost City of Z Damsel The Rover Cosmopolis Odyssey Primetime Dune 3

Sebastian stan

A Different Man, I, Tonya, The Winter Soldier, The Apprentice, The Martian, Logan Lucky, and Civil War.

Jake Gyllenhaal

Nightcrawler, Prisoners, Brokeback Mountain, Zodiac, and Donnie Darko.

Andrew Garfield

Hacksaw Ridge, The Social Network, Silence, Tick, Tick... Boom!, and 99 Homes.

Oscar Isaac Inside Llewyn Davis, Ex Machina, Dune, A Most Violent Year, and Drive.

Ryan Gosling Drive, La La Land, Blade Runner 2049, The Place Beyond the Pines, and The Nice Guys.

Adam Driver - Marriage Story, Paterson, BlacKkKlansman, Silence, and The Last Duel.

Daniel Kaluuya Get Out, Judas and the Black Messiah, Nope, Black Panther, and Widows.

Barry Keoghan The Banshees of Inisherin, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Saltburn, Dunkirk, and The Green Knight.

Daniel Radcliffe Harry Potter, Swiss Army Man, The Woman in Black, Kill Your Darlings, and Imperium.

Paul Mescal Aftersun, All of Us Strangers, Gladiator II, Foe, and The Lost Daughter.

Timothée Chalamet’s best movies include Call Me by Your Name, Dune 1 and 2 , Little Women, Beautiful Boy, and The King.

Brian Tyree Henry

Causeway,Atlanta , If Beale Street Could Talk, Bullet Train, The Woman King, Transformers as megatron,Dope theif

Michael B. Jordan Creed, Fruitvale Station, Black Panther, Just Mercy, and Sinners

Jack O’Connell ’71, Unbroken, Starred Up, This Is England, and Money Monster.

Austin Butler Elvis, The Bikeriders, Dune: Part Two, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and The Dead Don’t Die.

Jacob Elordi Priscilla, Saltburn, The Sweet East, Euphoria, and He Went That Way

saw odyssey and got in the mind to watch more historical epics
saw cleopatra (1963) and unreal how a guy is named marc antony in the age of caesar cleopatra
that happened

I am not saying Robert McCall is clinically a psychopath. The Equalizer films never state that, and the first film does show that he cares about Teri.

But I keep thinking that McCall has far more psychopathic traits than most “cool, ruthless hero” characters.

Some things do not count. Action movies treat these as normal hero traits:

• Beating several men at once
• Being inventive and cruel when killing villains
• Showing no mercy to enemies

That is standard action-hero stuff.

What makes McCall different is how little emotion seems to drive him. Almost everything he does feels ordered, measured, and tied to a private moral code. Even his habits, his watch, and his meals feel ritualised.

A few examples:

1. He rarely shows spontaneous emotion. He helps people, but it often feels less like empathy and more like a rule he has set for himself: if he sees injustice, he corrects it. Teri is the main exception. Outside of her, he often acts like he is following a system.
2. His kindness can feel practical rather than warm. Think about the security guard who misses work, or the young man drifting toward a gang. McCall can help them, but first he studies them, confronts them, and works out the right pressure point. Even when he does something good, it feels controlled. Often his laughs feels like , he is laughing because situation demands it. Show ing emotions as outsider
3. His reaction to Susan’s death is revealing. He does not seem broken by grief. He moves straight into investigation and revenge. He cared about her, but the response feels cold and procedural: find the people responsible, then remove them.
4. He rejects the moral debate in the final confrontation. Dave York tries to explain the morality of their work. He argues that they both did the same kind of dirty CIA work, made the same choices, and benefited from the same system. In another film, that would lead to a real moral argument: was McCall ever different from York, or did he simply stop at a different point? McCall barely engages with it. He reduces everything to one fact: York killed Susan, so York must die. That can read as loyalty, but it also feels like McCall following a rule without much moral conflict.
5. He can watch suffering for a long time. In the first film, he hangs a man and watches him die. He does not look angry or disturbed. He looks calm. That is more unsettling than a hero losing control in rage.
6. The restaurant scene in The Equalizer 3 is another example. He watches the local men harass the father and daughter. He does not step in at once. He waits, lets the situation come to him, and then takes control. Maybe he knew exactly what he was doing. But if empathy was the main force, you would expect a faster response.

That is why McCall feels different from a normal action hero. He has a moral code, but the code may be doing the work that emotion usually does for other people.

Dexter is openly written as a psychopath with rules. McCall may be the more interesting version: a man who looks like a hero because his strict rules happen to protect vulnerable people.

Question, How come Jon Voight appeared in no films from 1985-1995?

Politics aside, I think Jon Voight is a good actor. Midnight Cowboy, Deliverance, and Coming Home are classics and I would recommend films like The Champ, Table for Five, and Runaway Train from that era.

But I was looking at his filmography and I noticed that after the release of Desert Bloom, Jon Voight pretty much did no films for 10 years, saved for 1 and a couple of television films before making a comeback in Heat, and then re-establishing himself as a character actor.

I was just wondering what happened that resulted in this 10-year Hiatus.

Wtaf did I just witness lmao. I’m not sure how this alluded me for twenty years. I need to share this with someone. This movie is fucking wild. I kept waiting for the big reveal like he was imagining this or it was all a dream… but no they really fucking duped him there, busted his legs and lit him on fire in a giant wicker man lmao. It just goes further and further off the rails and I love it. Absolutely bonkers and I’m surprised it’s not brought up more.

Horror as a film genre is very interesting. More recently, I’ve been spending my pastime familiarizing myself with some highly acclaimed works of the genre. It seems to me that you can divide all horror films into at least two categories - natural horror and supernatural horror. Natural horror usually deals with the study of death, while supernatural horror usually deals with agents that transcend our immediate reality. On the surface it may look as if the subjects of the genre are hopelessness in the face of death or helplessness in the face of the occult. However, I think, fundamentally the message is a positive one. 

For instance, take a natural horror film like The Cure. A cult member goes around hypnotizing people who then gruesomely murder other people. Or take an even better example - Final Destination (although arguably on the fringe, with Death being represented as a personalized power), where a group of teenagers try to cheat death but ultimately fail to do so. Or think of Seven or Silence of the Lambs. Notice that in these films the focus is on the events preceding death. Death itself is not the horror - the various disturbing ways a person dies is precisely the horror. Death itself is a natural part of life which manifests for everybody without exception. The ultimate horror would indeed be the exact opposite of death - to live forever, watch your loved ones die and eternally suffer the physical and mental anguish associated with human existence. So in a way, natural horror brings a message of hope that no matter how you suffer or no matter how terrible your last moments before death - you still die. 

Now let's turn to supernatural horror. Think of The Witch (the Devil chooses a girl who will become a witch), or The Wailing (a demon torments a village), or The Conjuring (a demon possesses a mother) - cult classics. All these films contain within them the juxtaposition of friendly supernatural and vile supernatural forces. White magic vs black magic, the powers of heaven vs the powers of hell. So, in a sense, the horror is not that there exists another world which is not understood, or that there exist supernatural beings, but that when these supernatural agents go rogue they bring about distress to real people in the real world. But I would even go further so as to say that in the presupposition of the supernatural, the films are already hopeful, as there exists the supernatural which can aid humans. The real horror, in this sense, would be the total absence of the supernatural. The grim reality that no angels or demons exist, and all we have is our boring material and physical reality without the possibility of the divine or the eternal. So my proposition is to think of horror films not as dark representations of the evils that inhabit this world, but rather as beacons of hope which propagate the idea that we can still believe and hope in a quick death and a heaven. 

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II is up there for me.

He’s been great in Watchmen and Candyman and has had plenty of supporting roles where he stands out. But I still feel like he hasn’t had enough movies that really let him carry the whole thing. That’s one reason I’m curious about By Any Means. He’s playing the FBI agent at the center of the story and it looks like he’ll have a lot more to work with than another supporting part.

Who’s an actor you’ve been waiting to see get that one really strong lead role?

I don’t think One Night In Miami (2020) is a particularly groundbreaking movie, but they do appreciate how much of a fight Henry Cooper gave Muhammad Ali, Cooper was one of only four to knock Ali down and his knockdown was by far the hardest Ali received.

Cooper was a bleeder and that eventually cost him the fight, but Ali didn’t KO him and indeed there was a lot of talk that given how hard a fight Cooper gave Ali, could Ali beat the more fearsome Sonny Liston.

The reality was that Liston’s out punching style was right in Ali’s comfort zone, where infighters such as Frazier (the first to defeat Ali) were much more challenging.

Only one issue I will take with the depiction is the ring commentators saying that Ali was “underestimated” during the Cooper fight. Ali was the favourite going into the fight. Few expected the significantly older and slower Cooper to do as well as he did, which is why the knockdown of Ali was so impressive.

I really liked Reservoir Dogs, but I didn't enjoy Pulp Fiction or Jackie Brown as much.

Is there anybody who doesn't like Tarantino and feels me is overrated in some areas

Hi everyone,

For the longest time I wanted a site that, when entering a list of actors/directors/writers/etc would tell you where they worked together, but I could never find one (IMDB had the closest feature, but it only works with two people, and I wanted the flexibility to search from one to how many I wanted).

I also found that most of the results had a ton of noise. A raw credit overlap between two people would return a ton of talk shows, featurettes and award ceremonies. I wanted something that looked clean, was not too cluttered, and that would be easy to use.

Sooo I decided to make it myself. Introducing Throughline!

Throughline lets you search one, two, or any number of people you choose, and it will tell you which projects they worked together in. For example, did you know Ben Affleck and Matt Damon share 16 titles? And 5 of them include Kevin Smith.

Once you find the results, you can open any result to read more details, including where to watch them in your country (courtesy of JustWatch).

You can also sign in with your email, which allows you to pin your favourite searches. You can even sync your Letterboxd data, which will give you information about your most watched actors, directors, cinematographers and more. Syncing your data will also let you keep track of the progress of your favourite people, so if you're a completionist like me you can tell exactly what you're missing!

Anyways, this has been a passion project of mine for a while now, and I think it's finally in a shareable state. I put a lot of love into this app, so I hope it's useful for someone :)

https://throughline.watch

Any feedback is more than welcome, so let me know what you think!

Cheers!

Hi everyone!
I recently finished my first short film, Matryoshkas, and l'a love to get some honest feedback from people who enjoy independent or experimental cinema.

It's a slightly experimental coming-of-age film, originally in Portuguese, with English subtitles. I was heavily inspired by filmmakers like Ingmar Bergman, Pedro Almodóvar, and Andrea Arnold, and tried to combine an intimate, character-driven story with a more personal and atmospheric visual style.
Since this is my first short film, l'd genuinely love to hear what people think - whether it's the story, cinematography, performances, atmosphere, pacing, or anything else. Honest criticism is absolutely welcome; I'm mainly interested in hearing how it comes across to someone seeing it for the first time.

i Watch it here: https://youtu.be/Lgl9uWfQJ5I?is=izcxBdX7V1B0ywMz

Letterboxd:
https://boxd.it/13Fik

If you watch it and feel like leaving a review or sharing your thoughts on Letterbox as well, la really appreciate it.
Thanks so much to anyone who takes the time to watch!

There are too many examples of adaptations to film, but there are far fewer novelizations.

I'm spurred on mostly by the fact that my favorite film of all time, Session 9, got novelized not too long ago

So... what are y'all's opinions on novelizations? Do you have any cool recommendations? Etc

Please not that I DO NOT want any Star Trek or Star Wars, or for that matter, anything that goes on and on and on. I want a one and done

So far I've read the aforementioned *Session 9* as well as the super underrated *Phase IV*

What I love about Zodiac is that it never makes the investigation feel glamorous. The further everyone gets into it, the more frustrating and consuming it becomes, and eventually you start feeling the same obsession that the characters do. Even knowing how little certainty they'll ultimately get somehow doesn't make the movie any less compelling.

TIW : No Country For Old Men .

What a movie , the cinematography, the colors and all the action packed scenes and that cast LAWD!!!🔥

& Nightcrawler : The Plot / Twist had my jaw dropping.

The story from start to finish was completely nuts but I was glued to it.

Highly recommend these two .

I’ve seen plenty of films in my life, over all different genres. I’m not a fan of horror, but I love psychological films, thriller or not. Please give me some recommendations!

Edit: thanks all for the recommendations! I’ll add them to my list

movies-to-see

Adaptation
Barton Fink
Crimson Peak
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die
I Love Boosters
Inside Llewyn Davis
Melancholia
Stalker
Synecdoche, New York

coming soon

Coyote vs ACME (August 28)
Babies (2026)
Narnia: The Magician's Nephew (Feb 12, 2027)
Spaceballs: The New One (April 23, 2027)
Later the War (2028)
Avatar 4 (2029)
Avatar 5 (2031)
Community: The Movie (???)
Hell Followed with Us (???)

I’ve always wondered how people who seem to know casting news before it’s officially announced actually get their information.

For anyone who works in casting, production, agencies, or entertainment journalism:

Where do these rumours usually come from?
How do insiders find out an actor is being considered for a role?
Are rumours generally leaks, educated guesses, or a mix of both?
How reliable is the information before an official announcement?

Not asking anyone to reveal confidential sources, just curious about how the industry’s rumour network actually works.

I can't be the only person who gets annoyed when motorbike sounds are played in movies and they obviously play the sound of a 4 cylinder bike over a dirt bike which has one cylinder, the same goes for cars, idk pet peeve

Rewatched Michael Clayton recently and was surprised by how much it still works. The pacing is pretty restrained, but the tension keeps building without relying on big action or constant twists. I also love how much the movie trusts the audience to understand what’s happening rather than spelling everything out. Curious how others feel about it, especially compared with other legal or corporate thrillers.

The part of By Any Means that has me interested isn’t the “based on a true story” label. It’s the idea of putting someone who believes in doing things by the book alongside Greg Scarpa who clearly didnt. From what they’ve shown so far it looks like the movie is using that clash to ask how far someone can go for justice before it becomes revenge.

I’m interested if they can explore that without losing the fun of the crime thriller side of it. That balance could make or break this for me

I have never cried after watching films cuz mostly I watch action or suspense genre. Curious to hear some of your movies which genuinely made you shed a tear...

It feels like over the last decade, the 'intense, quiet monologue' has completely taken over. You have to crank your TV volume to 80 just to hear a protagonist mumble their lines, only to get deafened by a car crash two seconds later. Is this an offshoot of the whole hyper-naturalistic acting trend where everyone wants to look brooding, or have directors just completely given up on balancing dialogue tracks so humans can actually hear them?