A scene from “Before Sunset.” (2004)

Deadline reports that fans of Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy's onscreen romance have a great deal to look forward to: Before Midnight, directed by Richard Linklater, has just completed shooting and is entering the market at the Toronto Film Festival for possible distributors to bid on. The last Before [TKTime] film, Before Sunset, came out in 2004 and featured its lead characters reconnecting in Paris after nine years apart; it continued the story commenced in 1995's Before Sunrise, wherein the pair first meet in Vienna and spend a night exploring together. The new film takes place in Messinia, Greece--little did Ethan Hawke know when he signed on to these movies that he'd get to jaunt around Europe once a decade or so!

Chris Colfer (Getty Images)

The second half of this year's Tribeca Film Festival slate was revealed today, with Spotlight screenings of Julie Delpy's 2 Days in New York (her follow-up to 2 Days in Paris, costarring Chris Rock), Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's Chicken With Plums, and Tanya Wexler's Hysteria (starring Maggie Gyllenhaal in the story of the invention of the vibrator).

"Spotlight is an entry point for general audiences--it's a little more pop-culture-y. You'll see movies that already have distribution, and world premieres with a recognizable face or a director who's done many films before," said Tribeca Director of Programming Genna Terranova, citing Morgan Spurlock's Mansome, a documentary about male grooming, and Struck By Lightning, a film written by Glee co-star Chris Colfer. "It's a great movie for a younger set--the Glee set--which can range from teens to people much older," said Ms. Terranova.

The Cinemania program features edgier films from around the world, including the Tagalog-language thriller Graceland, the Finnish cyber-drama Rat King, and the American revenge drama Revenge for Jolly! Artistic director Frederic Boyer, formerly of Cannes's Directors' Fortnight, noted the more populist bent of his new position: "To bring very popular film--just for the audience, the mix is really interesting and a challenge."

The full slate for this year's Tribeca Film Festival is here.

Julie Delpy’s 2 Days in Paris, from her own screenplay, turns out to be as strenuously mean and anti-romantic as her screenplay for Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset, in which she co-starred with Ethan Hawke, is stirringly romantic. If I much prefer Before Sunset, it may be because I have always been a hopeless romantic, but I don’t think so. Ms. Delpy’s problem arises from a seemingly haphazard sequencing of moods and incidents as two supposed lovers, Ms. Delpy’s Marion and Adam Goldberg’s Jack, spend two days in Paris after a desultory vacation in Italy. She is a French photographer, and he a bearded non-gay interior designer, both living in New York. As it turns out, Paris is too much Marion’s old stamping ground—not to mention a city in which he does not speak the language—for Jack to be comfortable, and he therefore suspects everyone of at least duplicity, dishonesty and insincerity. At the home of Marion’s parents, Jack is mischievously served a bunny’s head in the lapin dish prepared by Marion’s playful father (Albert Delpy), in the hope that Jack, like all Americans, will be repelled by being served Peter Rabbit. Marion’s mother, Anna (Marie Pillet), like her father, is played by Ms. Delpy’s real-life parent.

Even less amusing to Jack are Marion’s three encounters with her ex-lovers in only two days, both on the street and in a series of overcrowded parties. On one occasion at a restaurant, Marion gets into a wild brawl with one of her old flames. Jack begins to think somewhat justifiable that Marion is a raging nymphomaniac. Not that Jack is any angel himself. On their first moments in Paris while standing on a long line for taxis, Jack shortens the line considerably by misleading a large group of American tourists into thinking that the Louvre is just a short walk from the airport, and they really don’t need a taxi to get there. Much later in the film, Jack encounters the same group of tourists giving him reproachful looks. This is not a bad gag setup as these things go, but Ms. Delpy never establishes Jack’s character sufficiently to get her laugh, if indeed she is even trying to make her audience laugh. No comfortable rhythm for the film ever materializes even for such surefire targets as rude and racist Paris taxi drivers. Ms. Delpy and Mr. Goldberg are clearly talented and versatile enough to make a more plausible and convincing couple, but the helter-skelter view of Paris in this film never gives them the chance. Another problem with the film may be its arbitrary alternation between English and French with subtitles.

Christophe Honoré’s Dans Paris (In Paris), from his own screenplay, presents a more somber, wintry view of Paris than is provided by Ms. Delpy in her comparatively touristy excursion into the city. In a very strangely backward look at the earliest days of the French nouvelle vague, the writer-director begins his film by having one of his major characters speak directly to the audience about the subject of the story, which is the frantic effort by one brother named Jonathan (Louis Garrel) to persuade his beloved sibling Paul (Romain Duris) not to commit suicide over a failed love affair with a beautiful and outspoken girl named Anna (Joana Preiss). The two brothers live with their always dying-to-be-helpful father, Mirko (Guy Marchand), who is estranged from their voluptuous mother (Marie-France Pisier). It is Christmas time and Mirko has dragged a Christmas tree through the streets to help celebrate the holidays with his two sons and any of their girlfriends who happen to drop in at any time of day or night. I know this sounds very strange, and that is because it is very strange. Structurally, it is mostly windup with very little delivery. The actors are all very persuasive from moment to moment, but by the time the end credits come on, one cannot see that very much has changed in any of the lives on limited display. We do learn in a roundabout way that a sister has died of her immense sorrow, and the two brothers have never really gotten over the loss. She smiled through her tears, says one of the permanently bereaved brothers, which could serve as the key to the overall morbidity of Dans Paris.

Meanwhile, the Museum of Modern Art Film Division is presenting a program of rarely screened films from French director Claude Chabrol from Aug. 17 through Aug. 27 at the Roy and Niuta Titus Theater, beginning at 6:15 p.m. on Friday, Aug. 17, with 2007’s Chez Maupassant: La Parure (The Necklace), a 29-minute short, followed by a William Irish Jr. story adaptation, 1979’s Les Histoires Insolites: La Boucie d’Oreille (Unusual Stories: The Earring), with a running time of 52 minutes. Next, at 8:15, is Fantomas: L’Echafaud Magique (1979). For information on other films in the program, call 212-708-9480. Since I have never seen any of these films, I can recommend them only to hard-core Chabrolians like me.

Last Saturday, on the second day of the series, Julie Delpy, the French-born indie star, trekked to the Kubrickian Prince Street retailer. The 37-year-old blond actress slipped almost unnoticed through a throng of visitors poking at iPods and PowerBooks. Upstairs, however, the gadgets played second fiddle for a packed crowd of cinéastes waiting to engage a flesh-and-blood industry insider.

Ms. Delpy, unassuming in a lacy white blouse, jeans and well-worn sneakers, was in town with two submissions at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, one of which, 2 Days in Paris, she starred in, directed, wrote, scored, produced and edited. “You have to get all the right elements around you; you’re the captain of the ship,” Ms. Delpy said of creating her new film—a Woody-Allen–esque romantic comedy about a bookish Manhattanite (Ms. Delpy) who brings a neurotic boyfriend (Adam Goldberg) to meet her parents in the French capital. And though Ms. Delpy indulged a few aspiring auteurs’ technical questions about cameras and budgets, she wandered into guileless quirkydom, too. “Being creative comes with a price tag; there’s another side that’s a little darker,” Ms. Delpy said, before joking that she surrounds herself with a team of doctors when filming.

A number of upcoming workshops promise to be every bit as captivating as Ms. Delpy’s. On Thursday, May 3, the actor, filmmaker and erstwhile heartthrob Matthew Modine (Full Metal Jacket, And the Band Played On) will follow suit by screening four shorts he recently created. On the following day, acclaimed director Marc Forster (Monster’s Ball, Stranger Than Fiction, Finding Neverland) will turn up to discuss the considerable financial and cultural impact of his past projects. (Mr. Forster is currently adapting the wildly successful Khaled Hosseini book The Kite Runner for the screen, so the audience will might hope to hear a few insights into that production as well.) And finally, an appearance by the artist DJ Spooky (Paul D. Miller) will conclude the series. Mr. Spooky, according to Apple, will speak about “his boundary defying work, Rebirth of a Nation, in which he deconstructs and remixes D.W. Griffith’s controversial 1915 silent film, The Birth of a Nation.”

Apple Store Soho, 103 Prince Street, http://www.apple.com

I should note that although the film has been very favorably reviewed by most of my esteemed colleagues, audiences have not flocked to see it because it's been described-more or less accurately-as 80 minutes of pure talk almost entirely between two characters, Celine (Ms. Delpy) and Jesse (Mr. Hawke).

These same two characters had talked up a storm nine years earlier during an overnight encounter in Vienna in Mr. Linklater's Before Sunrise (1995). As I recall, I wasn't overwhelmed by their first talky entanglement, though I continued to be moderately impressed by Mr. Link-later's seemingly quixotic attempt to bring articulate dialogue back to the movies at the expense of action, spectacle and MTV kinetics.

Indeed, much of the low-rent independent-film movement has made an aesthetic virtue out of its limited means. Ever since his Slacker put Austin, Tex., on the maverick-movie map in 1991, Mr. Linklater has served as spokesman for a new batch of disaffected youth-a group that has lacked any common cause to rally around. Up to now, a lot of his work has been hit and miss, so I wasn't prepared for what I encountered in Before Sunset , at a lightly attended noontime screening at a lower Manhattan multiplex.

What I wasn't prepared for were the long, lyrical camera movements through the streets of the most accessibly beautiful city in the world. The Ophulsian amplitude of the spectacle was completely sustained by the shifting moods of the two former lovers, who try to strike one light note after another and fail, miserable and painfully. Mr. Linklater and his two creative leads have managed a miraculous transformation of the characters from once-callow lovers into grown-ups teetering on the edge of eternity.

Some reviewers have compared this film to the prolonged stunt that was Louis Malle's My Dinner with André (1981), written by its two principals, Wallace Shawn and André Gregory, as a series of conversational power struggles. The audience-pleasing turnaround by the less presumptuous Shawn character over the ideologically overbearing Gregory is a much easier contrivance, and one that justifies the self-indulgence of the project. But nothing is really at stake for Mr. Malle's two conversational combatants. By contrast, Celine and Jesse find themselves on the edge of a cliff by the final fade-out.

Part of the surprise of Before Sunset can be attributed to its initially inauspicious premise. At the end of the first movie, the two were supposed to reunite in Vienna six months after their initial encounter; Jesse showed up but Celine didn't. At the start of the new film, Jesse finds himself in a Paris bookshop as part of the book tour for his best-selling novel-based, of course, on the events depicted in Before Sunrise . This is a big stretch, even for the long arm of coincidence, but in a way it makes sense: If Jesse were ever to meet up with Celine again, it would be in Paris, not Vienna. Still, can the movie survive the burden of all the expository back story needed to bring the two former lovers up to date? It does, and then some, as I have already indicated.

Along the way, Mr. Linklater performs prodigies of invention with the time and space coordinates of the mise en scène . His is the subtlest form of filmmaking, which is to say it's made to look and sound effortlessly minimal. Yet it is also marvelously fragile-as if at any moment the sheer improbability of the situation is going to blow up in our faces with a disillusioning blast of common sense.

After all, Jesse has a wife and little boy in New York, and Celine has a lover, a war photographer, whom she tolerates only because he is away on foreign assignments most of the time. She has never been able to connect permanently with any man since that fateful night in Vienna. Jesse's marriage is far from idyllic, but he is content to spend his remaining years watching his little boy grow up. The two lovers discover, to their amazement, that they were both living in New York for several years at the same time without ever running into each other. But neither character broods over the vagaries of chance. Jesse, in particular, has been meditating lately on his own mortality and confesses with some embarrassment that he once entered a Trappist retreat. He was pleasantly surprised to discover that the monks were a cheerful lot who never tired of wishing him well. No Sturm and Drang there.

Still, most of the burden of self-analysis and self-recapitulation falls on Celine, as if she were talking aloud in a desperate attempt to chart her own future. In the few glimpses we are given of Celine and Jesse from the first film, it is clear that Ms. Delpy's face has changed more than Mr. Hawke's. Her features are thinner and less lush; it's as if she's grown out of her youthful vanity and is preparing for more rigorously existential challenges.

There is a breathtaking moment when Celine makes a furtive, caressing gesture toward Jesse's head while he is looking out the limo window, then withdraws it hastily when he begins turning back. It's a subtle sign, and even in the midst of her tirades against ex-lovers, Celine notes that they have all credited her with teaching them to respect women-though they've invariably applied the lesson not to Celine, but to the women they've gone on to marry.

As the time nears for Jesse to catch his plane to New York-and take him out of Celine's life again, perhaps forever-she intuitively prolongs the suspense with two improvised pieces of performance art that serve to bring the film to an exquisitely metaphorical conclusion. I doubt that there will be a sequel to this sequel, nor should there be. Before Sunset is perfect as it is.

Raiders of the Global Economy

The Corporation , a nonfiction film by Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott and Joel Bakan, based on Mr. Bakan's book, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power , is the winner of the Joris Ivens Special Jury Prize at the Amsterdam International Documentary Festival, the World Cinema Documentary Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival, and the People's Choice Award at the Vancouver, Calgary and Toronto International Film Festivals.

Among its more familiar corporation-demonizing interviewees are Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn. So why, after 145 minutes of very ambitiously conceptualized Canadian agitprop, did I feel weary and depressed by the sheer futility of it all? At times, I felt as if I was trapped at a Ralph Nader rally; at other times, I couldn't help thinking of the German Communists in the last days of the Weimar Republic, confidently predicting that "After Hitler, us" as a rationale for letting the Weimar Republic perish without any resistance on their part. They were right, of course: The Communist Party came into power over a big chunk of Germany after Hitler perished, but only after millions and millions of people had been slaughtered.

If Fahrenheit 9/11 has been demeaned as preaching to the converted, The Corporation can be demeaned as preaching to the converted with advanced degrees in rabble-rousing. Speaking of which, I'm petrified by the thought of left-wing crazies pulling another Chicago '68 on the streets of New York during the Republican National Convention over the upcoming Labor Day weekend. All right, I admit it: I'm a centrist by temperament and conviction. I believe in voting for the lesser evil now over waiting for the absolute good of the future. I also believe that things can get a lot worse before they get better. And yes, I believe in incrementalism, and I believe in America.

However, The Corporation is very well informed about the legal origins of corporations and their current near omnipotence. The film outlines how the judiciary treats corporations as individuals, with all the requisite Constitutional protections, thus perverting the intentions of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which sought to protect liberated slaves, by giving corporations the same protections of due process. An environmental wrinkle is added to the traditional Marxist rhetoric against the capitalist system, but the word "capitalism" is seldom employed in The Corporation . To do so might've induced viewers to think about alternative systems, like socialism or communism. Nor is there much discussion of the ameliorative powers of representative democracy. There is no suggestion that Americans can ever use the ballot box to remove an oppressive government: We are all too brainwashed by corporate advertising to know what we really want.

This is all true, to a certain point. As much as anyone else, my tastes in consumer goods have been shaped by advertising. But where else in the world do I go to find a justly governed realm that's free of the brutal machinations of multinational corporations? I am too old to forage in the jungle. This is the only system I know, and if I'm farther from the top and closer to the bottom than I realize-like most of my equally deluded compatriots-I console myself with a vague awareness of the totality of human history, geography and sociology since the blessed days of the Garden of Eden. Everything I read about antiquity and the Middle Ages reeks of injustice and inequality and corruption.

So what do "we" do now? And how many of "us" does it take to make an effective "we"? The makers of The Corporation point to instances of group action-decertifying an irresponsible corporation in one locality, and restoring the water supply in a South American country to public control after a multinational company gouged the citizens for its own profit. But the movie really gets its adrenaline going with shots of milling crowds in the streets screaming and shouting for justice. Even so, no one goes so far as to preach the virtues of revolution, once such a rousing word for May Day speeches. Nowadays, even this workingman's holiday has gone the way of the dodo.

One can agree with The Corporation on the dangerously growing power of multinational corporations, which hide under the cloak of "globalization" and "free trade." And there should be no argument that the earth itself is imperiled by the excesses of a global manufacturing and consumer culture. As Walt Kelly's immortal Pogo once observed: "We have met the enemy, and he is us." How much environmental damage is caused by poor people in the Amazon rain forest chopping down trees to grow crops? Can a majority of the American people ever consent to be deprived of their gas guzzlers? If we all universally agreed to lead a more Spartan existence-regardless of the discomfort-I would have more hope for the future.