Before Sunrise (1995) / Before Sunset (2004) / Before Midnight (2013 Richard Linklater & co-scr)

Epic trilogy begins on a train, when Ethan Hawke starts chatting to Julie Delpy. They spend the day (and night) in Vienna, talking, walking, getting to know each other, often in long and continuous tracking shots... and ultimately fall in love. You really feel for them when they say goodbye at the station. (And I love that ending, which shows all the places they've been, empty.)

Jump forward nine years. Hawke is in Paris promoting his novel, which essentially tells the first story, and who is there at the bookshop? So they spend the rest of the day wandering around Paris, talking, finding out what's been happening to each other, why they didn't meet as promised in Vienna six months later, falling in love again. Julie sings (her own) beautiful song 'A Waltz for a Night', and he says 'Play one more...'

And then, in chapter three, we find Hawke saying goodbye to his son at the airport then joining Julie and their twin daughters in Greece, and then follows maybe the longest of all the continuous takes in the car (thirteen minutes). Where are they in their lives? They join a group of friends and there follows a conversation about love, ending when an older lady talks of missing her husband. "So he appears, and he disappears, like sunrise and sunset, so ephemeral. Just like our life. We appear, and we disappear, and we are so important to some, but we are just... passing through."

Then a big argument in a hotel, long but realistic, into a resolution, of sorts. But you wonder what episode four will bring.

The first was written by Linklater and Kim Krizan and (uncredited) Hawke and Delpy - they do get co-writer credit on the second two.

There's nothing else like it.

Extraordinary photography from Lee Daniel (the first two) and Christos Voudoris, all three edited by Sandra Adair. The distinguished author in Midnight is none other than veteran British cinematographer Walter Lassally. Thus when Delpy says 'I'm sure I remember seeing a place like this in a movie' she may well have been referring to Zorba the Greek, for which he won his Oscar!

'As I Walked Out One Evening' quoted, by WH Auden.