The Guardian on Before Sunset:

"Something I've noticed about Hollywood of late is that, at the end of each year, I find it increasingly hard, looking back over the movies I've written about, to recollect most of them with any clarity. I'm not losing my memory. I'm only 41, and I can give you chapter and verse on films I saw in the 1970s and 1980s. No, I forget movies now mainly because they're forgettable. I think I managed to get through the entire June-to-November period without seeing a single worthwhile new movie come out of Tinseltown.

My movie of the year was Before Sunset, Richard Linklater's wise and wistful sequel to his sublime, nine-year-old Euro-American romance Before Sunrise. Talky, soulful, intelligent and, at 80 minutes, remarkably succinct and profound, it was an eloquent repudiation by example of the bloated and empty spectacles - and sequels - that mainstream Hollywood laid upon us. But much of its appeal had to do, tangentially at least, with geopolitics.

Here an American man and a Frenchwoman talked calmly and intelligently and listened to each other with respect and honesty. One of the most upsetting phenomena in American political discourse this year has been the United States' insulting dismissal of almost everything any European has to say about anything, besides the increasingly haunted-looking Tony Blair. As much as anything else, Before Sunset is a fantasy about how a lively discourse between the two countries, and by extension, the two main western power blocs, might or should be conducted. Linklater displayed an admirable determination not to speak in the grotesquely hostile manner of the Bush administration - and for that, no less than for the exquisite romance he and his collaborators have wrought, we should be grateful."

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