After nearly a decade, Celine and Jesse (Delpy and Hawke) are still obsessed with the night they met, fell in love, then somehow neglected to exchange contact details. Now as Jesse visits Paris to promote his new novel, Celine tracks him down, and the two embark on an 80-minute chat before he has to catch his flight home. As they discuss politics and culture, aspirations and memories, relationships and sex, Celine and Jesse immediately click back into their easy conversational rhythms. But has too much water passed under the bridge?

Hawke and Delpy so easily re-inhabit these characters that you have to wonder how much they're based on themselves. Apparently open but secretly guarded, Hawke's Jesse again tries slightly too hard to be an offhanded charmer. Delpy's Celine still uses humour and sarcasm to deflect personal questions, then clearly reveals more than she wants to. They are so much fun to watch--their natural and witty conversation is full of intelligence as it cycles through both hilarity and pain, filling in the missing years--both what's happened as well as personal development.

And this is the most striking difference between the films: Their dialog here is deeper and more mature. Where the 20-somethings discussed opinions about religion, poetry, TV and music, these 30-somethings expose their feelings about the world at large--justice, politics, gender, urban numbness. This conversation has much more resonance for movie audiences because they're talking about things that affect us all.

Linklater assembles this expertly; he again films with long takes that capture vast unedited chunks of banter, following the couple in elaborate tracking shots. A few gentle flashbacks give glimpses of the original film, but we don't really need them. This story stands on its own as a second chance to change fate. It's a beautiful film, with a strongly emotional shift at the end that really packs a wallop of sadness, regret, rage, passion and rediscovery. Gorgeous.