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Midnight in Paris

In 2010, disillusioned screenwriter Gil Pender and his fiancée, Inez, vacation in Paris with Inez's wealthy parents. Gil, struggling to finish his debut novel about a man who works in a nostalgia shop, finds himself drawn to the artistic history of Paris, especially the Lost Generation of the 1920s, and has ambitions to move there, which Inez dismisses. By chance, they meet Inez's old college friend, Paul, and his wife, Carol. Paul speaks with great authority but questionable accuracy on French history, annoying Gil but impressing Inez.

Intoxicated after a night of wine tasting, Gil decides to walk back to their hotel, while Inez goes with Paul and Carol by taxi. At midnight, a 1920s car pulls up beside Gil and delivers him to a party for Jean Cocteau, attended by other people of the 1920s Paris art scene. Zelda Fitzgerald, bored, encourages her husband Scott and Gil to leave with her. They head to a cafe where they run into Ernest Hemingway and Juan Belmonte. After Zelda and Scott leave, Gil and Hemingway discuss writing, and Hemingway offers to show Gil's novel to Gertrude Stein. As Gil leaves to fetch his manuscript, he returns to 2010 only to find a laundromat in the cafe's location.

The next night, Gil tries to repeat the experience, this time bringing Inez along, but she returns to the hotel before midnight. Subsequently returning to the 1920s, he accompanies Hemingway to visit Gertrude Stein, who is critiquing Pablo Picasso 's new painting of his lover Adriana. Gil becomes drawn to Adriana, a costume designer who also had affairs with Amedeo Modigliani and Georges Braque. Having heard the first line of Gil's novel, Adriana praises it and admits she has always longed for the past.

Inez grows jaded with Paris and Gil's continual disappearances, while her father grows suspicious and hires a private detective to follow him.

Gil continues to time-travel the following nights. Adriana leaves Picasso and continues to bond with Gil, who is conflicted by his attraction to her. Gil explains his situation to Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, and Luis Buñuel; as surrealists, they do not question his claim of coming from the future. Gil later suggests the plot of The Exterminating Angel to Buñuel.

Back in the present, Gil meets Gabrielle, an antique dealer and fellow admirer of the Lost Generation. Later at a book stall he finds Adriana's diary, which reveals that she had been in love with Gil and dreamed of being gifted earrings before having sex with him. Planning to seduce Adriana, Gil plans to take a pair of Inez's earrings but is thwarted by her early return to the hotel room.

Gil instead buys new earrings, giving them to Adriana after returning again to the past. Later, a horse-drawn carriage appears and transports them to the Belle Époque, an era Adriana considers Paris's Golden Age. They go to the Moulin Rouge where they meet Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Gauguin, and Edgar Degas, who all agree that Paris's best era was the Renaissance. Adriana is offered a job designing ballet costumes; thrilled, she proposes to Gil that they stay. But he, observing the unhappiness of Adriana and the other artists, realizes that chasing nostalgia is fruitless because the present is always "a little unsatisfying." Adriana decides to stay, and they part ways. Meanwhile, the detective following Gil takes a "wrong turn" and ends up being chased by the palace guards of Louis XVI just before a revolution breaks out.

Gil rewrites the first two chapters of his novel and gives his draft to Stein, who praises his rewrite. Still, Hemingway says that on reading the new chapters he does not believe that the protagonist does not realize that his fiancée (based on Inez) is having an affair with the character based on Paul. Gil returns to 2010 and confronts Inez, who admits to having sex with Paul but regarded it as a meaningless fling. Gil breaks up with her and decides to stay in Paris.

While walking by the Seine at midnight, no carriage comes by but Gil encounters Gabrielle. As it begins to rain, he offers to walk her home and learns that they share a love for Paris in the rain.