Of the many virtues of seeing Julie Delpy do anything for roughly ninety minutes, her strutting Nina Simone impersonation in the very last frame of Before Sunset was easily the sexiest thing committed to celluloid in the last year. "Baby... You are gonna miss. That. Plane." I know. Planes, trains, automobiles, Vienna, Paris. Who wouldn't write a bestselling novel, thinly disguised as an all-points enchantress bulletin, and tour the Continent with it just to find her again? There's absolutely no reason why a sequel to a self-contained story of circadian rhythms should have turned out better than the original. But then, your thirties are supposed to be more interesting than your twenties. And it makes sense that not having seen each other for a decade (oh, come on, if they had met six months later, would there be a sequel?) has almost estranged them back into first encounter mode. So we get another day, another peripatetic chatfest with some tingly, but also prickly, catching up to do. Are they both presently with other people? Yes. Does one of them now have a child? Uh-huh. Does any of this matter remotely? Maybe. Kudos to Linklater for resorting again to the flickering neon question mark of a denouement, which for these two characters obviously works. Though plenty of that older-and-wiser badinage can drift back into post-college Eurorail banality ("How can you possibly think that the world is not going straight to hell?" belongs to a different French Celine, in a different decade), this generally occupies the realm of how real, flawed human beings talk to and seduce each other. I can't believe I'd live to say this, but a director's instinct to let his actors write their own dialogue has finally paid off. Hawke and Delpy have a frightening natural chemistry (I even hear one of them is single these days) and you get the sense -- and ain't it always the reaffirmingest kind -- that they derived as much pleasure making the film as we do watching it. Until 2014 in the land of the midnight sun. And make it fucking work this time.