The 10 Best Movies of 2024 (So Far)

We're nearly halfway through the year, which means it's time to name my favorite movies of 2024 so far right now. Hello everybody, I'm Dan Merl here at the halfway point of the year to look back on some of my favorite films through the first six months of 2024. So I'm gonna name 10 favorites in alphabetical order. I'm not gonna rank them just yet because things change over time, you revisit things. Before we do that though, I wanna name a few movies that didn't make my 10 favorites, but that I think are also worth your time. Bad Boys Ride or Die was a movie that I really enjoyed. I thought it was a great summer movie. Is it one of the absolute best movies of the year? No, but I certainly had a really good time watching it. The First Omen is kind of in the same boat. It's not one of the best movies of the year, but I thought that it was a really solid horror film and was able to do something a little bit new with a very old franchise. Furiosa a Mad Max Saga is a movie that's gonna be in a lot of people's top 10. I admired it, but I didn't love it. Still, it does have that crazy George Miller ambition and I think that makes it worth your time. The Greatest Night in Pop is a Netflix original documentary about the making of We Are the World and it's just a fascinating look at one of the biggest assemblies of stars in one room ever. I saw the TV glow came very close to this top 10. I think that some elements are very strong and it was uneven in other parts, but still one of the most singular creative visions so far in 2024. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes was a really, really enjoyable watch, even though I didn't love it quite as much as its predecessors in this new Apes franchise. It is also still a marvel at what technology can do. Sometimes I think about Dying as a movie I actually saw in early 2023 at the Sundance Film Festival, but it got its theatrical release this year. It stars Daisy Ridley and it's a really good small drama. If you haven't seen her in a role like this before, I think you'll enjoy that. And then Thelma was just recently released in theaters. It played Sundance this year and stars June Squibb as a grandmother trying to get her money back from con artists. It's a very funny movie and also sometimes moving in its portrait of the way that seniors can lose their autonomy as they get older. All right, let's get to my 10 favorite movies of the year so far, and in alphabetical order, the first movie is Challengers, which is directed by Luca Guadagnino. I thought that this was a really, really interesting look at an incredibly complex relationship between three tennis players. It's sports wrapped up with sex, wrapped up with mind games, and as I mentioned in my regular review, it has one of the best setups and payoffs that I've seen in a movie in a very long time. It also features a trio of strong lead performances, and I think it was actually done a disservice by the marketing, which kind of painted it as the threesome movie starring Zendaya. It's so much more than that, and as a character study, you're not gonna find much better this year. Second on my list is Civil War, the biggest movie ever from A24, and I think it says all you need to know about this movie that when I reviewed it initially, there were as many people in the comments that were condemning it for not making a strong enough political stance as there were condemning it for making too strong of a political stance, and on both sides of the spectrum. I think that was kind of the goal here, and it really is more a story about the effects of war. You see it through the lens of these journalists. At the same time, I thought it was a highly effective suspense film in many parts, and a movie that's also full of really strong performances. As far as the horror of war, I think this movie did one of the best jobs of painting what it would actually be like if you strip away what we've been taught by movies, and it's a movie that I would say that I enjoyed, but one that I'm not in a hurry to watch again because it does hit close to home. Number three on my list should be no surprise. It's Dune Part II. I'd be shocked if it wasn't still in my top 10 at the end of the year. All of the ambition and all of the promise that we had in the first movie was paid off in this movie. I think that Timothee Chalamet was great as Paul Atreides, maybe one of the most misunderstood main characters in literary and now cinematic history, and I thought that his journey in the film was really well-painted as this person who has destiny, or is it destiny, foisted upon him, tries to resist what he thinks are the pitfalls of that, and then ultimately succumbs to what other people say that he is and becomes the worst version of himself, or is it the best version of himself? There are so many questions to ask, and I also loved how they took the narrative and put it through Zendaya's character, Chani. At her point of view, Chani in the movie, Chaney in the books, I know it goes both ways, but I think it was important to have a character in the movie who saw Paul through different eyes, and in that way, I think the movie set itself apart from the book. I did have a few issues with the pace and the tempo because I think it had to speed through some things. It had so much to do, but at the same time, I think it is the best cinematic experience of the year so far. It's a movie I've watched, I think, twice or three times already, and it's a movie I can't wait to pair with the first film and experience as one big movie, and it sounds like we will probably be getting Dune Messiah at some point. It's got a lot to live up to, but Dune Part II did as well, and I think that it succeeded beautifully. Well, from one of the biggest movies of the year, we go to one of the smallest. It's an indie film called Ghostlight. I mentioned this movie on charts. I mentioned that Kelly O'Sullivan, who wrote and co-directed the film, actually went to the same high school as I did, but that doesn't color my opinion of the movie. I've hated stuff that people I know have been involved in before. Ghostlight, I think, is indie cinema at its best. It's a very small, intimate story. There really aren't a whole lot of faces in it that you've seen before. I think the biggest star, quote-unquote, in the movie is probably Dolly DeLeon, who was great in Triangle of Sadness, and she plays part of a local community theater group that's discovered by a father who's dealing with a lot of tragedy and difficulty in his life. His family is falling apart, and in this theater group, he finds a family, and he finds new understanding about what he's been going through over the past year or so of his life, and you're gonna hear me say this name a lot this year, especially as we get to awards season. There's an actor that stars in the movie called Keith Kupferer, who is so good. He doesn't have many huge credits to his name, and he actually co-stars in the film along with his wife and his daughter, who play his wife and daughter in the movie, and they're all great, but the anchor that he gives this movie, you see this tortured soul, and the catharsis that he gets, and the understanding and discovery, and the fear of that discovery. It's a tightly-wound performance, and then he just unleashes these waves of emotion. It's one of those movies, and this doesn't happen very often, where I found myself surprised that I was crying during it. I don't cry at a whole lot of movies, more as I get older, and usually when I do, I can feel it coming, but there were a couple moments in this movie where the tears just came, and it's also one of the films that movies are so personal, and when you see them at certain moments, they hit differently, and I think that Ghost Light just happened to hit me at a particular moment in my life that I really connected to. It's in about 500 theaters right now. I don't know how big of a release it's going to get, but it should be available widely on streaming and video-on-demand in the next few weeks, and I really can't recommend it enough. This is another one that I think is likely going to still be on this list at the end of the year, and just a really well-drawn, well-written look at a broken character, and the things that can maybe help to piece him back together. Another somewhat obscure film that's on this list is one that was actually recommended to me last year when I was in New Zealand, and I wish that I had actually watched it earlier. It's a movie called Hundreds of Beavers. Get your mind out of the gutter. You can actually rent it for like $250 right now on Amazon Prime Video, and it is a wonderful blend of Looney Tunes, Charlie Chaplin, Monty Python, and again, another great example of what indie cinema is, because this was just made by a small group of filmmakers who went out into the snow during the winter in Michigan and Wisconsin, and shot this story about a guy who's just trying to survive in the wilderness and has to hunt beavers and rabbits and all the different wildlife and go to a trading post, and he's trying to win the heart of the trading post owner's daughter, and it probably has the highest rate of jokes per minute of any movie you're gonna see this year. I was laughing throughout, and it's not necessarily a short comedy, but the visual language is there. It has so many really clever setups and payoffs and callbacks. It was the funniest movie I've seen this year, and almost nobody has heard of it, but it is extremely accessible and for cheap. Like I said, $250 on Amazon Prime Video. You can rent it right now. It is gonna be the value rental of the year, because I think this is a hilarious movie. It shows that all you need is comic timing and talent, because one look at the movie will tell you that it has almost no budget, but I loved Hundreds of Beavers, and I think that you will too. We've got a lot more to get to, but before we do, I wanna thank the sponsor for this video, AG1. Everyone has their own health journey, and I've been working on mine, and one step in that journey for me is AG1. I like to drink it in the morning to get the day started, because I know that even if I get thrown a curveball, I've already done something positive for my body every day. 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If I had to recommend one product to support whole body health, it's AG1, and that's why I'm excited to have them as a partner on the show. Starting your journey with AG1 is a win. Try AG1 and get a free one-year supply of vitamin D3, K2, and five free AG1 travel packs with your first purchase at DrinkAG1.com slash Dan. That's DrinkAG1.com slash Dan. Check it out. All right, I'm gonna cheat just a little bit here with my next film. It's a movie called The Imaginary, and it doesn't actually come out until next week, but I figured a July 5th release date, I think that that's close enough for me to grandfather it into this video. The Imaginary is from Studio Ponoch in Japan. I believe the last movie that they did was Mary and the Witch's Flower several years ago, and it was started by some producers and artists that were heavily involved over at Studio Ghibli, and it is a very obvious influence. I think that some people might call this derogatorily a Studio Ghibli ripoff, and like I said, the style is very similar, but I think that this movie also operates very well on its own terms. It features some gorgeous 2D animation, again, in that Ghibli style, and the plot is actually somewhat similar to If. It's about an imaginary friend who worries about his real person disconnecting with him and finds a community of other imaginary characters who are also in search of real people, but it goes deeper than that, and the animated format is able to bring life to all of these imaginary characters in so many different ways. It has that heart. It has that emotional impact. It is all very close to what you get with Studio Ghibli, but it's hard to live up to that standard, and I don't think that the imaginary gets quite there, but it gets close, and on top of that, just the beautiful animation is really something great to watch. It is going straight to streaming. It'll be available on Netflix so you can watch it at home, and if you do get the chance, don't miss out. I think you'll enjoy it. I would say I tried both versions, and I would actually recommend the Japanese original language version over the English dubbed version. Nothing against the dub actors, but I did like the voice performances a little bit better in the original Japanese. Next up is the movie that is just dominating the box office right now, which is Inside Out 2. Pixar has been a little uneven lately, both financially and creatively, but I think that Inside Out 2 is right up there with the best work that they've ever made. It would be really easy to just do the same movie again and cash in and probably make a decent amount of money, but I think that Inside Out 2 did what sequels need to do. It showed an advancement in the storytelling of its characters. You bring in all of these new emotions, and they represent the maturity of Riley, the human character that we've been following, and at the same time, it feels authentic. It doesn't feel zany like these cartoon characters are making a person act like they would never act in real life. It is a reflection on what actually happens to people as they age, and not just as they become teenagers, but as they go into their 20s and 30s and 40s, and the struggle with all of these different new emotions, it may not have 100% of the emotional resonance of the first Inside Out, maybe because it deals less with childhood and it's more with puberty, but I think it gets pretty close, and there's a few lines in it that just struck me right in the heart. I really, really liked Inside Out 2, and it would be tough because Inside Out is my favorite Pixar film. This was more than worthy of the original movie, and I think it's also one of those cases where I look at a movie that's absolutely crushing at the box office, and I'm happy because I think it truly, truly deserves it. Next up is a movie from Shudder that had a decent theatrical release and is now available on streaming. Late Night with the Devil stars David Dismalchian as a late night host who tries to perform a seance live on TV to boost his ratings, and much like Hundreds of Beavers, it's very obvious that this was not a movie that had a huge production budget, but it makes the most of that budget. It structures the movie in such a way that they didn't need to shoot on a massive budget, and I think that it's got some really effective scares. The whole found footage horror thing, of course, has been done so many times, but I think it uses that format effectively. It did get caught up in some controversy around some of the images in the film being boosted or created using artificial intelligence, and I understand the concerns around that, but I feel like the conversation around it got so outsized compared with the use in the movie, and in many ways overshadowed the movie, and I don't think that it deserved that given the part of the work that the AI was supposedly used for. I think the movie also deserves the same amount of focus for its effectiveness as a horror film and for its performances. It's great low-budget indie horror. I'm glad that it got such a big platform nationally. Shudder's doing great with a lot of their films doing that hybrid release, and you can watch it right now on Shudder if you missed it in theaters. Another film from A24 makes the list here, Love Lies Bleeding stars Kristen Stewart and Katie O'Brien, and I think I said in my review that this is a very horny movie, and it is indeed very horny, but it's also very good with performances not just from Stewart and O'Brien, but also Ed Harris and the rest of the cast, and really this is a movie that I think would have a great shot at being on my top 10 at the end of the year, except for one particular choice it makes near the end where it goes into sort of a different mode, and I understand the intention there, but it just kind of fell out of sync with the rest of the movie, and I think it also colored a lot of people's reactions to the movie, but when you look back at the bulk of the movie, I thought it was just really effective looking at the way that ambition and love can mix with each other and how one affects the other. It's about how control and best intentions can sometimes hold somebody back, or does somebody need to be held back? These are all questions that the movie asks, and with such strong performances and a strong visual style, I think that Love Lies Bleeding is one of the most unique movies, and I use that word a lot, but it's great to find a movie that fits that because a lot of other movies don't fit that word. It is one of the most unique movies that I've seen. Like I said, perhaps a little too unique once you get to the end, although I understand the purpose behind it, but still really, really effective, atmospheric, moody, and I liked it a lot. The last movie on my list, not surprising because they're making some of the best ones out, is another one from A24 called Tuesday, which is in theaters right now. It stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus as the mother of a sick girl named Tuesday, played by Lola Pettigrew, and it's a movie where you just have to go with the premise, and it's a premise that's established right from the beginning of the film. In the film, Death is represented by a macaw that can change its size from very, very small to massive, you know, 10 feet tall or more. It is a story about Tuesday, her mother, and Death, again, represented by this talking bird, but it's not all bleak or sort of meditative. There's a lot of humor in the movie as well. I was shocked, given the premise of the movie, at how much I laughed, and it is another example that the premise isn't everything because some people might look at it and be like, a talking bird named Death, this movie's gonna be ridiculous, but it is so authentic and speaks to what it's like to be dying, what it's like to be the dying person, what it's like for Death to be this person who's surrounded only by the dying, and also what happens with Death and a dying person where the transaction is usually very simple when they see something in each other that they've never seen before, and there are consequences to things in this movie that almost go into the science fiction in scale and scope, and it takes so many turns that I didn't see coming, and yet, when you get it down to its essence, it is really about what it's like to be human and what it's like to love someone, and that's what's important, and that's what I think is so refreshing about the movie and what made it so interesting to me is that it's able to do all of these patently ridiculous and absurd things and yet feel so real and so true and so grounded, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus is great, Lola Pettacrew is great, really kind of a three-person team here when you add Death into the mix. One of the most interesting movies that I think you'll see if you do check it out, but also one of the most effective. So those are my 10 favorite movies of the year so far. There are a few that would have or may have made this list had they been released, and they mostly came out of the Sundance Film Festival, but just to put them on your radar, one of them is called Didi, which opens on July 26th. It's a coming-of-age story set in the early days of YouTube. Another one is called Kneecap, which is the story of a real Irish band that opens on August 2nd. A Real Pain, which is directed by Jesse Eisenberg, 100% would have been on this list had it been released already. Eisenberg stars alongside Kieran Culkin as two cousins that are taking a trip through Poland. That movie is being released in October, and there's a documentary that's coming out later this year that also would have been on this list. It's called Ibelin, which is about a gamer who left a legacy that nobody knew about until after his passing. I don't have a release date on that, but I do believe it's gonna be streaming on Netflix. So what do you think? What were your favorite movies of the year so far? Let me know down in the comments below, and as always, thank you so much for watching the channel. Be sure to stay tuned right here for the rest of 2024 and beyond for more movie news, reviews, box office, and more. Until next time, stay safe, and I'll see you then. Bye.