Before Midnight premiered on January 20, 2013, at the
2013 Sundance Film Festival. It had its international premiere out of competition at the
63rd Berlin International Film Festival. The film opened to general audiences on May 24, 2013, at five theaters in New York, Los Angeles, and
Austin, Texas. It was released wide in 897 theaters on June 14, 2013.
Box office The film grossed $8,110,621 domestically and $15,141,309 internationally, for a worldwide gross of $23,251,930.
Metacritic gives the film a weighted average score of 94 out of 100, based on 41 critics, indicating "universal acclaim". It was listed as the third-best film of the year after
12 Years a Slave and
Gravity. It was the second-best reviewed film of 2013 according to Rotten Tomatoes, after
Alfonso Cuarón's
Gravity. According to
Total Films Philip Kemp, "As with its two predecessors—and with the films of French New Wave director Éric Rohmer, presiding deity of this kind of cinema—
Midnight's essentially a film about people talking. But when the talk's this good, this absorbing and revealing and witty and true, who's going to complain?... [It's a] more-than-worthy, expectation-exceeding chapter in one of modern cinema's finest love stories. As honest, convincing, funny, intimate and natural as its predecessors." Perry Seibert of
AllMovie also praised the film, writing: "The screenwriting trio fill the movie with long, discursive conversations (there are only two scenes in the first 20 minutes) that feel utterly improvised when they are performed, but are far too deftly structured to be anything other than the work of consummate artists." Eric Kohn, in
Indiewire, gave the film a rave review, adding it to his list of Top 10 Films of 2013 and writing, "With
Before Midnight, Richard Linklater has completed one of the finest movie trilogies of all time."
Peter Bradshaw of
The Guardian called the film "intimate and intelligent". ==Accolades==