10. “Knock At The Cabin”
Ooh, these posters rock. What a simple but effective way to immediately sell and communicate the nature of the story, but it’s also deceptively cute. A little girl sits in a green grass field of yellow buttercup flowers, and she’s offering it to a group of people off-screen. But clearly, those dark shadows, along with the tagline, “save your family or save humanity,” suggest something much more darker and chilling. The way those shadows fall and the composition of it all definitely loom with the idea of darker, more frightening times to come (the stark, black-white, and red illustrated versions are great too)
9. “Anatomy Of A Fall”
A stark white poster, a body in the snow with blood seeping out from the head and two bystanders looking back in horror, all from an elevated angle to suggest that someone’s been watching above and knows the whole truth of it. Justine Triet Palme d’Or winning film centers on a woman (Sandra Hüller) who is suspected of her husband’s murder, and their blind son who faces a moral dilemma as the sole witness. And what a striking and starling image, unnerving, intriguing and compelling you to know more, much like the daring movie itself.
8. “Eileen”
Designed by GrandSon Creative, the same company that created great posters for “Red Rocket” and “Funny Pages,” the moody and atmospheric poster for William Oldroyd‘s “Eileen” features powerful, extraordinary images that speak to the psychological drama’s potency. A twisty tale of obsession starring Anne Hathaway and Thomasin McKenzie, about two women working at prison who grow closer and their intimacy inspires the younger, more impressionable woman to explore new facets of her personality to the point that her metamorphosis begins to take a sinister take. With some illusions to Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona” (a classic movies about two women’s personalities blurring together with haunting imagery) darkness consumes this poster. You have to reach into it, stare, to find the characters faces, a scared looking McKenzie in the middle (holding a gun at the bottom) with two superimposed images of varying alarming quality of Hathaway’s face bleeding into her silhouette, suggesting all the overwhelming dark subjugation to come.
7. “El Conde”
Having circuitously tackled the subject of Pinochet, the draconian Chilean dictator that ruled that country with an iron fist for nearly two decades, several times already, filmmaker Pablo Larraín wisely goes with something much more humorous for his first direct approach at the autocrat. He turns the story of an evil authoritarian into a black comedy horror film and satire that portrays the despot as a 250-year-old vampire seeking death. The contrast of the heavy subject, and the way the subject is handled is brilliantly depicted in the poster: a stark black and white image of Pinochet, but his sunglasses are rendered in neo pink, along with the titles. The more overtly vampiric companion piece poster with a bat hanging upside down is also rather hilarious.
6 .“Barbie”
Everything about the “Barbie” marketing campaign for Greta Gerwig’s subversive take on an iconic brand was brilliant. Look, character posters are usually the worst ones, bland, just selling the star, etc. The “Barbie” campaign, created by BLT Communications, used the toy’s design, colors and aesethtic as a secret weapon, creating character posters that almost acted like trading cards you’d want to collect (it didn’t help that almost all of them had incredibly simple, but clever taglines, introducing self-effacing ideas like, “He’s just Ken,” aka, the second fiddle into the pop culture lexicon). “Barbie” is a sharp, but funny and entertaining movie, and all the “Barbie” posters radiated the idea that this was going to be a fun time at the movies and it surely was. All of them are extremely playful, but extra kudos to the IMAX one playing off of the iconic image from “2001: A Space Odyssey” that the movie riffs on from the top.