‘Before’ no more?

Richard Linklater has done some of his best work with the three “Before” films — “Before Sunrise” (1995), “Before Sunset” (2004) and “Before Midnight” (2013) — sketching the arc of a relationship between characters Jesse and Celine over the course of two decades, from the first rush of romance to the burdens of family and routine. One has come along every nine years, and if there’s going to be a fourth, he needs to start working on it soon. But fans of the series shouldn’t get their hopes up. “We’re at the five-year mark, which is usually about the time we start, but it hasn’t happened,” Linklater said. “The last one was more grueling than the others. … It was just a tougher thing to depict, a longer-term relationship. That’s less fun than the romance of the meeting or reuniting. It was just more of a grind to actually make a compelling movie about what it was. “They’d be 50-ish for the next one, I guess,” Linklater said. “So does the trilogy become a quadrilogy? We don’t know yet.”