Halfway Check-In: The Top 10 Movies of 2024 So Far
As bleak as 2023 felt in the middle of last summer right before Barbenheimer, 2024 is probably even bleaker. There’s no big tentpole in the summer, good and bad news. The bad: we’re untethered, with superheroes or Christopher Nolan/Greta Gerwig not really here in 2024. But the good: being untethered from hype, all these unknowns have a chance to start some new summer trend, and take movies into a new direction: like the return of the sexy thriller…and a world hopping showcase of animation excellence!
As for this halftime top 10, the movieworld should be thanking Zendaya and Hollywood’s writers, who struck and pushed the newly cemented movie star and her two big films into this year. That’s the last time Z will ever be doubted again as far as I’m concerned.
Here are the Honorable Mentions, a really random mixture:
There have been more than a few movies about what it’s like to be an immigrant. Julio Torres and Tilda Swinton have honestly found a brand new, insane way into that genre. This movie works because of the creative Torres, whose mind is a vast complex of nonlinear thinking and weird innocence, which Swinton’s walking privileged New Yorker is more than happy to enter into a messy co-dependent partnership with, to the amusement and sometimes horror of the audience.
If I had to pick the next director to make an all time classic, Goran Stolevski is near the top of the list. This one, his third, is maybe his best yet? Stolevski takes us deep into the lives of Macedonia’s LGBTQ residents. Yes they are beset on all societal sides with persecution, mockery, and potential harm, but when you look deeper those tribulations spawn these makeshift families, loving and messy and sneakily funny as any other family.
I’ll admit, it takes about 30 minutes or so for Alice Rohrwacher and Josh O’Conner’s little gem to suck you in. But if you commit to it, the rest of the movie washes over you like a hazy fable, filled with such an ephemeral essence it draws you closer and closer and plants inside your head. When it ends, you’ll rise up, wondering what the hell you just watched, where that question will plant in your head for a long time, like all great movies can do.
Pixar lived up to this sequel hype! Joy, Disgust, Fear, Sadness, and Anger are joined by Envy, Ennui, Embarrassment, and Anxiety as Riley becomes a full blown teenager. This film is as perceptive and deep as the first film, using their therapist consultants to mine incredible humor and pathos in equal measure, showing people how emotions evolve and grow as a human does.
A film noir moved into the near past. Rose Glass finds some electric chemistry between our burly femme fatale Katy O’Brian and the grizzled mulleted never better Kristen Stewart, drawn to each other from minute one. Rose Glass then takes us on a dirty, sweaty journey into the New Mexico underworld of crime, bodybuilding, and all sorts of other shenanigans, while turning up the heat minute by minute by minute.
Denis Villeneuve’s epic delayed blockbuster is just a magnificent piece of big budget filmmaking. In addition, we are seeing a host of new movie stars really rise to the occasion to make this one work. Timothee Chalamet, Zendaya, Austin Butler, and especially Rebecca Ferguson up their game to make sure the biggest movie of 2024 delivered, and then some, in all its sandwormy, Mwadiby glory.
There were already a couple movies about Imaginary Friends made earlier this year, but this Netflix gem is going to be the best one, I’m calling it now. Told from the Imaginary Friend’s point of view, this films opens with pure magic, and builds upon it, beginning to end. And not only do we get wonderful, old fashioned 2d animation, but accompanying it is a wealth of layered ideas, some that will work for kids, and some that will work even more on adults, wrapped into a rousing family adventure. Bing Bong would approve!
The surprise of the year. A 2d French Animated film accomplishes in 90 minutes what great filmmakers like Christopher Nolan and Denis Villeneuve can’t do in less than two and a half hours. Set in a future world where AI and humans are intermingles, Jérémie Périn takes us on an epic, complex journey into a look into humanity’s possible future, and all the consequences/complications that we’re going to be entangled with as our society grows and evolves with more artificial intelligence advancements.
No superhero movie could turn up the heat like this Luca Guadagnino masterpiece, maybe his best film. Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor play a double pair of tennis players, completely entranced by Zendaya’s Tashi Duncan. What follows is a propulsive, intoxicating, adult, messy affair, wonderfully stitched together by Guadagnino and acted by the three leads, turning the normally uptight tennis into the sexiest sport ever, at least for a couple hours.
It had been too long for Richard Linklater. After a so-so filmography since 2016, he bursts back onto the scene with this gem, an incredible fusion of a series of genres that shouldn’t work but do thanks to his brilliance. Also helping this movie work are Adria Arjona and co-writer and movie star on the rise Glen Powell, sizzling together and crafting fascinating, exciting, sexy characters constantly dancing and evolving around one another, in the most satisfying, entertaining ways possible.
