There was one scene in Before Midnight that I found surprisingly upsetting. It’s a scene at the beginning of the movie where Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and his teenage son are preparing to say goodbye at the airport. Jesse’s son has been holidaying with his father in Greece but now he has to return home to his mother in America. There’s nothing in the scene that calls attention upon itself. The conversation is the usual stuff. They talk about school, about sports and about other trivialities. Plus, Jesse’s son seems incapable of stringing more than two sentences together. But the understatement is its strength - it bubbles with things left unsaid. And when Jesse’s son finally does say something meaningful, by telling his dad that its the best summer he’s ever had, Jesse is quietly overwhelmed.

But it’s just a great scene overall. There’s a great moment, after Jesse’s son has headed into security, where Jesse waits for his son to turn back and wave goodbye. He’s yearning for it. He desperately wants it. But it never happens. Alas, Jesse’s son is a teenager and has yet to develop any lingering sentiment. This is no big deal to him. He’s still young - he still has plenty of time. But Jesse is now becoming aware of how fleeting life is and how much everyone means to him. He’d die just to receive some acknowledgement from his son.

The scene also kind of echos the end of Before Sunrise where Jesse says goodbye to Celine (Julie Delpy). He exits the train station on his own, kind of in a haze. He’s just had the best night of his life and he wants that feeling to last forever but now he’s been cut adrift; he doesn’t quite know what to do with himself. And so it is in Before Midnight as he staggers out of the airport. He doesn’t want to have to say goodbye.

Maybe this is why the scene resonated so much with me. I’m far too accustomed to saying goodbye to loved ones at airports. For a while I seemed to be doing it every couple of months. And it never really gets any easier. The desire is to always have other people orbiting you, but as you get older you realise that’s not possible. People have their own lives and you can’t dictate where they put roots down. But it still doesn’t make it any easier when you have to leave them or if they decide to build a life away from you.

Jesse’s life now is firmly with Celine. They live together in Paris and they have two children. Near the beginning we have a fantastic scene where they talk about what lousy parents they are - their daughters have been wanting to see some ancient ruins, but as they’re asleep in the back of the car, mum and dad are reluctant to wake them and break their peace and quiet. The dialogue and acting are wonderfully natural and it’s a promising beginning to the movie.

After this, Before Midnight begins to wobble a little bit. There are a couple of frustrating scenes that seem to go on for far too long. One deals with Jesse talking about his new writing projects. They sound incredibly pretentious, which is perhaps the point, but lots of the scene revolves around a friend fawning over what a genius he is. But as Jesse talks about his ideas, you begin to wonder what his friend has been smoking, because these novels sound unbearable.

The next scene also had me worried. Wealthy people sit around a table in an idyllic locale, drinking wine and eating good food while trying to figure out love and the problems with the world. Sorry, but I have very little tolerance for these kinds of scenes. It’s hard for me to listen to your bitching while you’re guzzling wine in a locale that looks like it should be an Unesco heritage site. Most people, when they’re trying to figure things out, have to sit around the table eating microwave pizza while staring at flaking walls as Splash plays on the TV behind them. You meanwhile, privileged wine guzzler, should just take a look at the paradise you’re living in. You don’t really have it that hard. Yes, you have the same needs as everyone else, but...you live in fucking paradise, not Romford! I’m sure it’s easier to figure things out when you have the sea to look at instead of chavs stealing your flowerpots.

However, as frustrating as most of the scene is, it does have a poignant ending. One of the guests talks about her dead husband and how she can no longer really remember what he looks like. She also talks about how we appear and then disappear. And this is one of the themes of the film - how transitory everything is. In life we’re doomed to live on this earth for the equivalent of a few seconds. But love can be even more fleeting than that. When it starts, everyone thinks it’s forever, but it takes work to keep it shining. It can die far too easy.

As the film progresses, and Jesse and Celine are thankfully left on their own to hog the screen, you realise that they’re at a crossroads in their relationship. They can either stay together or they can go their separate ways.

The conceit of the film is that they have an evening to themselves away from their children and friends - their friends have booked them a hotel room. The intention, of course, is that they’ll have a romantic evening on their own.

On the way to the hotel they talk about how they met and their hopes and fears for the future. Everything seems fine but there are one or two little cracks. At one point Celine asks Jesse whether, if they were on the train again where they first met, and if she looked as she does now, would Jesse make a move for her. He dithers a little and she gets annoyed at him. She’s looking for reassurance that he still desires her but he fails to provide an emphatic response. In his defence, he’s desperately trying not to lie to her. Were they both single and if they didn’t know each other, his older self probably wouldn’t start that conversation, either because his youthful fearlessness has gone or because a single, middle-aged Jesse would do the cliched older man thing and try and find some young girl. So poor Jesse is kind of trapped. He still loves and desires Celine, but he doesn’t want to lie to her, so his weird response just ends up sounding weasley. Jesse tries to worm his way out of things by saying that it doesn’t matter, that when it counted he made the first move, but it’s too late. Celine’s question was a little test and he spectacularly failed. He should have just said yes.

Later on we find out that there’s maybe more reason for this question than we thought. When Celine and Jesse get to the hotel they have a big fight. As each person digs into the other, foolishly trying to ‘win’ the argument, we find out that Jesse might have possibly slept with a young fan of his while on a book tour. Jesse doesn't admit to it but he doesn't deny it either, which, as far as men go, means that he did it. But the whole feeling that you have as you watch them argue is that these issues should have already been resolved. If you think your partner has been cheating, you should try and find out. And then if they have, you can either leave them or try and give them a second chance. But if you give them a second chance, you need to do just that. You can’t throw it in their face when you have a disagreement. Forgiving doesn’t necessarily mean forgetting, but you can’t bring it up as a weapon when things get tough.

But of course, this is much easier said than done. In an ideal world you’d be able to talk about all your problems and get everything figured out with a level head, but relationships are complicated and messy. When you have a row, the gloves can come off. It’s a defence thing. You feel like you’re being attacked and so you go on the counter. And before you know it, things have escalated to a ridiculous extent.

The issues in Jesse and Celine’s relationship are multiple. Firstly, Jesse wants to be close to his son but Celine doesn’t want to move to America for this to happen. Which is entirely understandable. She has a career she wants to start and she has roots in Paris. At the same time, you can understand Jesse’s frustration. He moved across the world to be with her but now he wants to be near his son - his son is entering his most important years and Jesse feels like he’s stranded. Then you have Jesse’s apparent infidelity. It seems like this issue hasn’t been resolved at all and that Jesse hasn’t entirely won back Celine’s trust. Both of these things threaten to be cancers in their relationship. But they needn’t be. They just need to talk about them. They need to forget about scoring points and using other things against their partner and find the answers together.

But then what kind of film would we have if people just talked very reasonably to each other? Instead we have a magnificent film. Probably one of the best in the last few years. Jesse and Celine aren’t married, but what happens in Beyond Midnight is an alarmingly accurate look at what can happen in married life. I know that I saw quite a few echoes in the film.

Most of all, though, I really care about these people. I feel like we’ve grown up with them. It’s kind of the fictional equivalent of Michael Apted’s Up series. Every few years we check in to see how Celine and Jesse are doing. At the moment they don’t seem to be doing too great. But there’s a lot of hope for them. They still have a lot of love for one another. You just hope they can find a way through the bullshit life throws at them and the bullshit they create for themselves, because they’re obviously meant for one another.

I think I’d probably go so far to say that this is the best film in the series. Before Sunrise is breathtaking and magical, and Before Sunset finally makes your hopes and wishes for the characters come true, but Before Midnight is messy and complicated and surprisingly funny. I don’t remember laughing that much during the previous films, but here I laughed a lot. It’s such a rich, vivid film. It deserves all the plaudits and awards it can get its hands on.

There are many ways to try and make yourself look younger. Some people slather themselves in Oil of Olay, while others are a little more drastic and go under the surgeon’s knife. But what if you lived in the 16th Century? With Boots absent in the local market and a sorrowful dearth of plastic surgeons, what options do you have available to you? Cover yourself in ceruse and give yourself lead poisoning? Or maybe slaughter some virgins and cover yourself in their blood? Oh yeah, that last one sounds like a brilliant idea!

But how does one come upon such a drastic idea? Do you have to be born with the demented mind of Vlad the Impaler? Perhaps. But striking your servants also helps. And hitting them so hard that you draw their blood is especially important. And then once you’ve done this, don’t forget to smear the blood all over your face and crazily tell yourself that you look years younger.

This is what Erzsébet Báthory, a Hungarian countess, does. Enraged at the failure of a relationship with a younger man, she blames her age. And sadly, all the make-up in the world does little to ease the wrinkles and the insecurities that come with them.

Thank heavens then for servants and virgins and the restorative powers of their blood!

Based on the life of a Hungarian psychopath and mass murderer, The Countess is an unexpected project from writer, director and actor Julie Delpy - I’ve never known her to voyage into such dark, murderous territory. But it’s not a particularly worthwhile venture.

Hamstrung by horrible acting and leaden writing, The Countess kind of feels like a Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, minus the poetry and complexity. Here women are collected for their blood but there’s little sense of tragedy or gravity.

A large portion of the blame must fall upon the relationship between Báthory and her younger lover István. They share a night of passion together and István is almost beside himself. But he’s such a wimp and his affection has such a queasy, fawning quality that you find it hard to understand what the Countess sees in him (besides his fit, young body). Does it please her ego to have attracted such a young man? Does he give her feelings of self-worth? It has to be something she’s projecting onto him because István himself is an empty vessel.

Their moments together are probably some of the worst since Titanic. You know how the women cooed and their hearts fluttered when that steamy hand hits the car window and when Rose holds poor, shivering Jack in her arms, his cherry well and truly popped, and how all the guys responded by rolling their eyes and snickering because Jack has immediately placed himself in a subservient position? Well, my reaction was much the same. So you’ve had some earth-shattering sex? Have some dignity! No need to be a clingy child about it. Just strut over to the fridge and finish that leftover curry as a reward for a job well done. Okay, I know they didn’t have fridges back then, but you get the idea. Go and hunt a deer and roast it over an open fire before ripping it apart with your bare hands? Would that be the 16th Century equivalent of raiding the fridge?

Before they can shack up and live happily ever after, István’s father finds out about his son’s relationship and prevents his son from seeing the Countess again. Wow, just when you thought the character couldn’t be any more dickless! Daddy has locked you up and handed you the sternest ever cock block. And to cap it all off, István’s father makes his son marry someone else and even writes some letters to Báthory, pretending that they’re from István to kill the relationship off for good.

And so the seeds are sown for Báthory’s descent into madness.

To be fair, once the Countess goes ape shit and starts bathing in people’s blood, the film becomes a hell of a lot more watchable. But that doesn’t mean it gets any better. The scene where the Countess yells at her underlings to find a beauty remedy that actually works is ridiculously hysterical.

But it does have a kind of car crash quality that at least makes you want to find out what happens next. Ooh, she’s slowly draining her maid of blood. Will the maid realise that she’s being killed and try and make an escape, or will she just meekly accept it?

And there’s also plenty of comedy in the kinky S&M relationship that develops between Báthory and a young count. Count Vizakna enjoys being beaten and so therefore we get to see this brutally ugly Count get belted by a somewhat bored Julie Delpy. Okay, so you go from having this ridiculously pure, innocent, twinkly love to kinky S&M. That’s a big 360. It’s like you’ve gone from missionary to water torture with gimp masks in the span of twenty four hours.

Perhaps more impressive than this though is the fact that the Countess designs a special blood extracting seat - virgins are strapped into a chair and then a frame with spikes is shut around them and their blood is collected. So now she’s like the Himmler of virgin blood extraction? She no longer has to worry about slowly bleeding girls or messily murdering them - she can kill them in an orderly, systematic fashion.

And so it goes for the rest of the film...

Towards the end there’s a half-assed attempt to add some ambiguity. It’s put into question whether these murders ever happened or whether it was a conspiracy to take away the Countess’s power - the men in the story seem to be uncomfortable with a woman wielding power. But it’s added so late in the game that the damage is done.

To be fair, there are a couple of good moments in The Countess, such as the creepy moment when Báthory is bathing in blood and sees herself in the mirror - we see her deluded point of view and her reflection looks much younger than the reality. But moments like this are few and far between - for the most part The Countess is a hysterical collection of wooden acting and stilted dialogue; it’s a clunky, awkward film.