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Upon completing “Before Sunrise” in 1995, the movie’s director Richard Linklater and its actors, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, fell to task on a follow-up. After all, the conclusion of that movie—when the fevered lovers, Jesse and Celine, promise to meet again after six months—begged for it. The result, “Before Sunset,” flashes us forward nine years.

Jesse is now a successful author touring Europe to promote his latest book. But he’s never gotten over Celine, with whom he never re-connected. And, in the manner of all broken-hearted writers, he’s spilled his guts in a novel based on their one-night encounter. At his Paris stopover, Celine, who lives in the city and works for an activist organization, seeks him out at his book signing. The two are understandably thrilled to see each other, and, however flushed and flustered, eager to catch up. But Jesse has precious little time—only 80 minutes, in fact—before he must rush off to the airport en route to his none-too-happy life back in New York.

This real-time compression is a shrewd device because it gives the movie its emotional urgency and, as the minutes lapse, we feel the characters closing in on the brink of their mutual fate. Dramatically, “Before Sunset” works on us like slowly tightening spirals. It begins with wide, slow spirals as the lovers banter over the general state of things, over topics as disparate as religion, gun violence and the environment. But what Jesse and Celine mean by this innocuous back-and-forth is to glean the state of each other’s souls, how their once-youthful chemistry might be affected by nine years’ worth of aging and experience. As their moments tick away, the spirals tighten as the two press each other on more immediate matters—relationships and marriage, especially– while trying to come to grips with a long-ago night in Vienna that haunts them both.

Where “Before Sunset” falters at all is when it overloads itself with words. The dialogue can get overwrought and prosaic—an unfortunate Linklater trademark—and the scenes feel like hurried line readings, like a pressurized can of energy that the actors have shaken a bit too excitedly. But, as the movie’s closing passages prove, you can reveal so much more with almost no dialogue at all; with the merest glance, a song and a dance, worlds of yearning can pour forth.

Linklater has time and again demonstrated his gift for opening up space, for allowing his story-worlds to breathe and become an organic part of the action. Like much of his earlier work, “Before Sunset” takes place mostly outdoors and unfolds predominantly in long takes and with a moving camera. Cinematographer Lee Daniel takes up the challenge gracefully; as Jesse and Celine stroll through a Parisian evening, Daniel creates a lovely canvas of ever-shifting light and shade. Of course, he and Linklater are aided immeasurably by Paris itself. With its old-world waterways, cobbled streets and cafes, the city exudes the values of freedom, romance, and a love of the past—everything that Jesse and Celine pine for and struggle to articulate in the course of the movie.

“Before Sunset” slows to a delicate, heart-rending conclusion in Celine’s apartment, one fully earned by this trio of devoted filmmakers. Jesse’s moment of departure is also his moment of reckoning, for he must answer for himself a question he nudged aside at the movie’s beginning—of whether he’s a romantic or a cynic, and, for that matter, what is it he truly values in life. These are questions that this charming, intelligent romance also encourages us to ask of ourselves.

Grade: A-

Written by: Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke
Directed by: Richard Linklater
Cast: Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy

“Ordinary life is pretty complex stuff,” says the flinty, long-suffering Harvey Pekar in “American Splendor,” based on the writer’s autobiographical comic book series. For 27 years now, Pekar has been picking apart the complexities of his own ordinary life—his neurotic struggles with home, marriage and work—and committing them to comic book form.

Sheri Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini’s movie can’t fairly be summed up as an adaptation of Pekar’s celebrated comic books. True, there are entire vignettes that have been lifted from their pages and brought to screen. But “Splendor” is feistier than that, culling together aspects of documentary and biopic, with dashes of animation, to arrive at a truly multi-faceted portrait of its hero. It’s an inspired way for these hitherto documentary filmmakers to unravel Pekar’s knotty persona, beginning with his 60s-era days as a jazz critic and frustrated file clerk at a Cleveland veterans’ hospital (a job from which he retired two years ago) to his gradual emergence as a cult comic-folk hero.

While Pekar writes his comics, he has always handed drawing duties over to an assortment of artists over the years. Hence, his illustrated incarnations have varied from artist to artist, ranging from the harried, sinister-looking Pekar of Robert Crumb to the more realistic, clean-cut renderings by Joe Zabel and Gary Dumm. Berman and Pulcini exploit that “Hall of Mirrors” aspect of Pekar’s persona, often using these artists’ disparate styles in animated form to enliven their scenes. Indeed “Splendor’s” visual design, with its comic book flair, is a knockout alongside the moody brilliance of Terry Stacey’s cinematography.

Keeping all this spinning is a pair of performances by Paul Giamatti and Hope Davis, playing Pekar’s wife, Joyce. More than just looking their parts—Giamatti with his indignant scowl and Davis with her stoic face and owlish glasses—they inhabit them wonderfully. They dig deep into their characters, finding lonely, passionate souls yearning for companionship and purpose. Grounding “Splendor’s” fretfully funny narrative are the real-life Pekar’s narration and interviews with him and Joyce. They not only reveal the couple’s robust humor and intelligence but also give the movie a dash of self-referential whimsy—an inspired cinematic equivalent to the postmodern self-referencing of Pekar’s own material.

Berman and Pulcini’s movie briskly guides us through the terrain of Pekar’s life, but here’s where “Splendor” stumbles a bit. Wrapped up in charting the main beats and turns of Pekar’s biography, it loses the inherent melancholy of Pekar’s work, the despair and dread that fills his work’s quietest moments. It gets the mood right, but never slows enough to explore its richly existential landscape—the cynical, ultimately humanist, musings at the heart of Pekar’s comic manifestos.

Grade: B

Written/Directed by: Shari Springer Berman, Robert Pulcini
Cast: Paul Giamatti, Hope Davis, James Urbaniak, Judah Friedlander, Jesse Perez