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      The Best Movies From 1999, According to Our Critics

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      In our view, these eight comedies, dramas and more have attained classic status 25 years later. Let us know your own picks.On the 25th anniversary of what many argue is the greatest year in movie history, we asked film staff writers and critics to share the movie from 1999 that they love the best or feel is most overlooked. After reading their picks, let us know your choices.Best Comedy‘Being John Malkovich’Capping a decade of high-concept comedies, Spike Jonze’s “Being John Malkovich” (available on most major platforms) raised the stakes with the most outlandish premise yet: When a downtrodden puppeteer (John Cusack) takes an office job to make ends meet, he discovers a hidden portal there that allows him to enter the mind of medium-famous character actor John Malkovich. Jonze’s smartest instinct is to resist piling onto a concept that’s already perilously clever. Instead, the movie is underplayed, intimate and even a little scuzzy-looking. But that approach to Charlie Kaufman’s surprising screenplay leaves room for viewers to wonder as they watch: Why are we so certain that our lives would improve with even a modicum of fame? And are these bodies the wrong containers for what we feel inside? KYLE BUCHANANBuchanan’s other 1999 favorites: “eXistenZ,” “Three Kings,” “Election,” “The Talented Mr. Ripley”Best Drama‘Beau Travail’Claire Denis’s film focuses on the French Foreign Legion soldiers stationed in Djibouti.Pathé TVA haunting exploration of desire and violence, Claire Denis’s “Beau Travail” (available on major platforms) takes place in the East African country of Djibouti, a onetime French territory. There, French Foreign Legion soldiers practice drills, their bodies synced and individualities subordinated. At times, they dance with African women, their gazes uneasily summoning up the history shared by the formerly colonized and their colonizers.Loosely inspired by Herman Melville’s novella “Billy Budd,” Denis’s beguiling tour de force takes shape after one soldier (Grégoire Colin) rescues another, an act that disturbs a sergeant (Denis Lavant). The soldier “seduced everyone,” the sergeant says in voice-over. “Deep down I felt a sort of rancor, a rage brimming.” With minimal dialogue, ravishing visuals and meticulous attention to sensuous detail, Claire Denis elliptically charts what binds these men — tracing lines between love and hate, past and present, nation and self, masculinity and militarism — in a film that remains as disturbing as it is seductive. MANOHLA DARGIS

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      What’s on TV This Week: ‘Inside the N.F.L.’ and ‘The Bachelorette: Men Tell All’

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      The CW airs their annual show. Jenn Tran confronts her past suitors on ABC.For those who still enjoy a cable subscription, here is a selection of cable and network TV shows, movies and specials that broadcast this week, Aug. 26-Sept. 1. Details and times are subject to change.MondayU.S. OPEN TENNIS 7 p.m. on ESPN. It’s that time of year when there is a crisp in the air, and some of the greatest names in tennis — Coco Gauff, Novak Djokovic, Carlos Alcaraz — are back on the courts in Queens, though Rafael Nadal will be noticeably missing. On Monday, the first rounds will begin, and games will continue every day through Sept. 8 for the finals. We can only hope they will be as thrilling as the scenes from Phil’s Tire Town game in “Challengers.”TuesdayJenn Tran and Devin Strader on “The Bachelorette.”Disney/John FleenorTHE BACHELORETTE: MEN TELL ALL 8 p.m. on ABC. If you are an avid watcher of this franchise, you know this is one of the best nights of the season. Directly following the fantasy suite dates, which will air the day before on Monday, the Bachelorette Jenn Tran is going to gather all of her former suitors into one room so they can bicker and throw jabs. There has been lots of fighting this season, so I wouldn’t expect this night to be any different. To get the full experience, I recommend watching it with a crowd of friends.FIRING LINE WITH MARGARET HOOVER: COUNTING THE VOTE 9:30 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). With the presidential election now weeks away, Margaret Hoover will break down the basics of voting and emphasize the reliability of the country’s voting systems, addressing former President Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud in 2020.WednesdayHud on “Claim to Fame.”DISNEY/Christopher WillardWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Venice Film Festival: Marina Cicogna’s Glamorous Legacy

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      Cicogna, who died in November, was the face of the Venice Film Festival for decades and a pioneer for women in the Italian film industry. She also knew how to throw a party.She threw at least one party that would have made Bacchus envious, photographed Greta Garbo and Marilyn Monroe (both friends), co-produced the Oscar-winning “Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion” and distributed films by the directors Luchino Visconti, Luis Buñuel and Pier Paolo Pasolini, among others. If a person can personify a global film festival, Marina Cicogna was for decades the face of the Venice Film Festival.Born in 1934, two years after her maternal grandfather, Giuseppe Volpi (who was one of Benito Mussolini’s finance ministers), helped found the festival, Cicogna (pronounced chi-CONE-ya) helped transform it into a global event. She also championed Italian cinema as a producer and distributor, and she pushed the boundaries of what women could achieve in a male-dominated industry.For those who knew Cicogna, who died in November at 89, she was not only a striking and glamorous figure but a generous and endlessly curious filmmaker. In addition to her grandfather’s enormous legacy — not to mention the family’s tremendous wealth — her mother, Countess Annamaria Volpi di Misurata, owned Euro International Films, which laid the groundwork for Cicogna’s immersion into Italian cinema.“When Marina appeared as a distributor and producer in the second part of the ’60s, she was a new and important presence,” said Gian Piero Brunetta, a historian of Italian cinema who wrote “The Venice International Film Festival, 1932-2022.” “Marina was in the perfect moment to interpret the change happening in Italian cinema. Movies at this time were able to open a dialogue with the intelligence of the audience and address present problems. Marina was a protagonist in all of this.”Cicogna at the Venice Film Festival in 1957. She was a fixture at the festival, which her family helped create. Mario De BiasiArchivio Mario De BiasiMondadori, via Getty ImagesThat individualism was evident to those around her, from the world’s biggest stars to writers, directors and those who benefited from her commitment to the festival and the burgeoning Italian film industry after its post-World War II neorealism stage. (A festival spokeswoman confirmed that there were no official plans to honor Cicogna at this year’s festival, which runs Wednesday through Sept. 7.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Interview’: Jenna Ortega Is Still Recovering From Child Stardom

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      If you have a tween daughter, as I do, you know that Jenna Ortega is a big deal. In 2022, Ortega starred as the title character in Netflix’s “Addams Family” reboot, “Wednesday,” and quickly became beloved by viewers for her character’s snarky, dark and brutally honest personality. The show was a hit, and suddenly Wednesday — and by extension Ortega — were everywhere: on merch, on the streets for Halloween and all over the internet doing her meme-able dance moves. It was the kind of star-making, culture-saturating role that is life-changing for a young actor. It was also, as Ortega told me over the course of our two conversations, completely disorienting to become so famous so fast.Listen to the Conversation With Jenna OrtegaThe actress talks about learning to protect herself and the hard lessons of early fame.Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Amazon | iHeart | NYT Audio AppOrtega didn’t appear out of nowhere. She started as a child actor on the Disney Channel, played the young version of Jane in the CW series “Jane the Virgin” and later starred in the “Scream” and “X” horror franchises. Now she is 21. Her next big role is in the new movie “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” the sequel to Tim Burton’s 1988 classic, which opens nationwide on Sept. 6. (Burton also directed several episodes of “Wednesday.”) Ortega plays the daughter of Winona Ryder’s character, and she told me that they bonded over each having found enormous success in Hollywood at a young age.When we spoke — I caught her in Ireland, where she was filming the second season of “Wednesday” — I found Ortega to be a thoughtful and curious person who, like many young people, is still finding out who she is. “I’m just navigating,” she says of this stage of her life. “I’m on my own little personal expedition.” Only she is doing it under the glare of a massive spotlight.When did you first see the original “Beetlejuice”? Honestly, I can’t really put a date on it. I feel like I had to have seen it maybe when I was 8 or 9. I was terrified of everything when I was younger. I actually had a recurring nightmare about Beetlejuice. I saw a really terrible Halloween costume before I really knew what the movie was, and I think that the mold and smearing, bleeding green and black Party City makeup gave me a scare. I just remember that image, and then I watched the movie later, and I thought, Oh, man, this is what the guy was dressed as. This is just as scary.What were your nightmares about Beetlejuice? I shared a room my entire life growing up. I was the bottom bunk on a bunk bed, and I had a dream that Beetlejuice would come down and swing around the banister to my bunk wearing a Superman cape, and he would offer me grape juice and say, “Got any grape?” More

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      Venice Film Festival: Filmmakers Race to Finish Their Movies

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      With the Venice Film Festival beginning, filmmakers are racing to the finish line to have their work ready for screening.When a movie is selected to premiere at a festival, it’s a time of celebration for the filmmakers. But it’s not an end to their labors.Very often, there’s work left to be done on the movie before it’s unveiled to the world. While fans excitedly scroll through the latest showcase at an upcoming festival, some of the filmmakers might still be sweating over making their movies look and sound exactly as intended.It’s all a normal part of the process when postproduction and festival calendars overlap, whether at the Venice Film Festival, which opens on Wednesday and runs through Sept. 7, or at Cannes or Sundance.After Venice announced its latest lineup, many filmmakers were still polishing the sound mixing, color correction and visual effects of their movies. In late July, Dea Kulumbegashvili, the Georgian director of the competition title “April,” was still completing aspects of her film about an obstetrician who performs illegal abortions.A still from the film “April.” Memo FilmReached at Studio Babelsberg in Potsdam, Germany, she said she was waiting on around 10 shots with visual effects that needed to be finalized. She described the nature of the effects somewhat enigmatically as “a character” in the film that required a careful eye across many long-sequence shots.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Isabelle Huppert on the Importance of the Venice Film Festival

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      The veteran French actress of stage and screen is the jury president of this year’s Venice Film Festival.Actors often have more than one project on the boil. The French actress Isabelle Huppert takes multitasking to the next level.For the next 11 days (Wednesday through Sept. 7), Huppert is heading up the jury of the Venice Film Festival, watching nearly two dozen movies (together with the other jurors) and handing out awards, including the coveted Golden Lion.In the days and weeks leading up to the festival, Huppert has been working nonstop.Earlier this week, for two nights in a row, Huppert performed alone onstage at the Ruhrtriennale festival of the arts in Germany, delivering the 100-minute monologue “Bérénice” (an adaptation by Romeo Castellucci of the 17th-century French tragedy by Jean Racine).Days before that, she was on a film set in Belgium, playing a fictionalized version of Liliane Bettencourt — the billionaire heiress to the L’Oreal cosmetics fortune — in “La Femme la plus riche du monde” (“The World’s Richest Woman”).Huppert’s résumé is correspondingly impressive. She has more than 120 films to her name, as well as an Academy Award nomination (best actress in 2017 for “Elle”) and quite a few theater productions. She manages to toggle between film and stage acting, appearing regularly in cinemas and theaters around the world.Fresh off the set in Belgium, and busy relearning her lines for “Bérénice,” Huppert discussed film festivals, the future of cinema and the American stage director Robert Wilson in a recent phone interview. This interview was conducted in French and has been edited and condensed.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Zoë Kravitz’s ‘Blink Twice’ Is a Horror Mystery Inspired by Her Frustrations

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      In the summer of 2017, Zoë Kravitz, on a break from shooting a movie, posted up at a cafe in London with her laptop and began drafting her first full screenplay.It wasn’t immediately clear to her what it would become, she said: “At first I wrote this kind of stream-of-consciousness novella, where the characters came to life.”They eventually inhabited “Blink Twice,” her directorial debut, which revolves around a tech billionaire with a private party island and the guests — whether unsuspecting, or complicit — who are lured there. It’s a Bacchanalia with shades of “Lord of the Flies” and Adam and Eve. At once a psychosexual thriller, a horror-mystery, a revenge fantasy, a dark comedy and a commentary on gender and class, “Blink Twice” was not inspired by any one event, or by her professional trajectory, Kravitz said in a recent video interview.“It was more of an emotional thing that I was trying to work out — a combination of my own experiences and experiences of friends and family, other women that I’m close to, and not really having a place to put those frustrations and complicated feelings,” she said.She had always wanted to direct, she said, but had no plans for how that would come to pass. But as she wrote — she finished the screenplay with her friend E.T. Feigenbaum — she realized she couldn’t “trust somebody else with this vision that I was having.”The polished “Blink Twice,” due Friday, stars an ensemble led by Channing Tatum, now Kravitz’s fiancé, and Naomi Ackie (“Star Wars: Episode IX — The Rise of Skywalker”). The cast includes Adria Arjona (“Hit Man”), Haley Joel Osment and Geena Davis. They shot on location in the Yucatán, “about an hour away from any real town,” Kravitz said, giving them a heightened sense of camaraderie. “We ate all our meals together. We hung out on the weekends. It was like this magical, magical time.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Incoming’ Review: Not Another Teen Movie

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      Freshman engage in some fairly predictable debauchery in this routine high school gross-out comedy streaming on Netflix.“Incoming,” a bawdy teen comedy from the directors Dave and John Chernin, opens with a familiar gag: an awkward adolescent boy (Mason Thames) delivers a speech to the camera professing his love, only for a cut to reveal that he’s actually rehearsing in the mirror. In a genre rank with cliché, this is not a very promising start — it suggests that the Chernins, who also penned the screenplay, are satisfied with whatever joke is closest to hand.The rest of the movie does little to dispel that impression. Its story of high school freshmen navigating a libertine house party follows exactly the trajectory you would expect, with few laughs and even fewer surprises. If there’s a cute girl incoming, she’ll be introduced in a slow motion montage. If a couple leans in for a kiss, they’ll be interrupted by a lewd gag. Will the dork score with the hottie? Will the rowdy teacher get out of hand? Cue the record scratch sound effect!A generous interpretation is that “Incoming” is derivative as an act of loving homage. In practice, it just feels old hat. The movie is heavily indebted to the teen gross-out comedies of the late 1990s and early 2000s, like “American Pie” and “Van Wilder,” which were themselves indebted to the teen sex comedies of the 1980s, like “Porky’s” and “Screwballs,” and it’s so far from an original idea or point of view that it’s hard to see the point.All it offers is ribald escalation: Instead of beer bongs, there are lines of ketamine; instead of fart jokes, there’s diarrhea in a Tesla. Maybe that’s progress. But I’d say the filmmakers flunked.IncomingRated R for strong language, drug use, sexual innuendo, mild violence and “Porky’s”-style shenanigans. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More