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For this week’s column, I spoke to Dawn Baillie, who is responsible for, or who has collaborated on, some of the most iconic American movie posters of the last four decades, from The Silence of the Lambs (1991) to Barbie (2023). Her work is currently the focus of an extraordinary ongoing exhibition at Poster House in New York City.I asked her if she would humor me by selecting her top ten movie posters of all time, now a tradition for this column. She most graciously accepted the challenge. Baillie’s top ten and comments are listed below in descending order. She explained that these are all posters she “refers to often,” and presents her selection with the caveat that she could easily list 50 more. Dawn Baillie’S Top Ten Favorite Movie POSTERS1. USA one-sheet by Erik Nitsche for All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, USA, 1950)When we talk about encapsulating...

June proves another solid month for posters. Here’s hoping it’s the continuation of a trend that will keep pushing through to the winter and not one last gasp before the summer ushers in the usual avalanche of glossy photo collages.

If the indies keep coming (many below were first seen on the 2023 festival circuit), we should be in good shape. Because despite falling way behind the studios in terms of screens, they will always outnumber Hollywood in terms of titles. That’s simply the state of the industry today. You must sift through the noise to find the prize.

Supernatural

Jordan Scott is back with a new feature 15 years after her debut Cracks with Fable at the helm of the marketing campaign. Their first sheet for A Sacrifice presents a seemingly normal landscape rotated ninety-degrees so that the horizon line turns vertical. A forest scene at the edge of a lake,...

In the comments section of last year’s Best Movie Posters of the Year I got a nice shoutout from an unexpected and most welcome source: the Alhambra Cinema in Keswick, in England’s Lake District. Built in 1913, the Alhambra is apparently the sixth oldest continuously-running cinema in the UK. I’ve been writing introductions to these annual Movie Poster of the Year roundups for fifteen years and so I am quite happy to cede the floor this year to the good folks at the Alhambra, because who better to talk about movie poster design than the people who run one of the cinemas that rely on it?Excellent choices and all great posters. For our cinema in the Lake District, the five quads we have outside make a big difference. When a poster is truly impactful, it definitely draws people in (I would only have added “The Duke” and...

Romantic crime drama “Till the End of the Night,” which plays in competition at the Berlin Film Festival, has debuted its first clip (below) with Variety, and its poster, designed by the U.S. graphic designer Midnight Marauder.

The film, directed by Christoph Hochhäusler (“The City Below”), is a complex love story intertwined with crime and deception, starring Timocin Ziegler as gay cop Robert, and introducing newcomer Thea Ehre as trans woman Leni. The script is by Florian Plumeyer, and the producer is Bettina Brokemper at Heimatfilm. The Match Factory is handling international sales.

In order to gain the trust of a drugs dealer, undercover cop Robert has to pretend to be Leni’s lover. The police hope her ties with the felon will help him to infiltrate the organization. But while this part of the plan works relatively smoothly, their fake relationship is rocky from the start. Robert was once in love with Leni,...

The posters in my list this year are those that do what any poster worth its salt should do: they stopped me in my tracks. These days those tracks are less and less likely to be along a city street or even inside the lobby of a multiplex and more likely to be on a virtual stroll (or scroll) through a streaming service or social media feed. The received wisdom is that this will result in a dumbing down of poster design, leading to work that is less complex and easier to take in in a one-inch high thumbnail. In other words, more big heads. But the 30 posters below, most of which I likely saw first on a phone screen, give the lie to that doomsday prediction. They are posters that not only work on first glance but reward repeated viewing. In other words, you could hang them on your wall.

Above: 2021 UK quad poster for 4K restoration of The 400 Blows. Design by The Posterhouse.50,000 Movie Poster of the Day fans can’t be wrong. Yes, just this week my Movie Poster of the Day Instagram—a feed that was a spin-off from this column—surpassed 50,000 followers, which is a little ways off Cristiano Ronaldo’s 411 million and still a tenth of the half a million that Movie Poster of the Day used to have on Tumblr, though I never quite believed those numbers. But I put a lot of faith in my Movie Poster of the Day followers and so every six months I like to collect and rank the most “liked” posters that I have posted in the previous 26 weeks as some sort of bellwether of popular taste.The 400 Blows poster above racked up 3,168 likes earlier this year, making it the third most-liked poster I’ve ever posted (for...

One of the final things I latched onto at Grasshopper Film was Friends and Strangers. I’d heard no word before its Rotterdam programming and it caught my attention in an early-year festival crush for no other reason than a) some pleasant stills and b) the promise of an Australian comedy, which had more or less never come into my sight in five years of distribution.

Within, say, two minutes I knew this had to be followed through—James Vaughn’s perfectly lit images of metropolitan life were composed like Heinz Emigholz, its performances willingly stilted, the vibe vaguely threatening. Progressively the thing grows funnier, its direction harder to guess, structure slightly bewildering yet fully determined. By film’s end Friends and Strangers is plainly fucking hilarious, teetering on the possibility of violent outburst, finally a wise statement on personal misdirection.

Cut to one year later. Though I no longer...