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Monday, January 5, 2015

Top 10 Week... Posters of 2014

#10: Blue Ruin

The perfection of this poster is best understood if you've seen Blue Ruin. In a typical revenge thriller, the guy holding the gun would be the one seeking revenge, but the scene depicted in the poster is just one of the many scenes in which things go terribly awry for the protagonist. It's a great "mood" poster, too.


#9: Guardians of the Galaxy

I love the Guardians of the Galaxy poster for much the same reason I loved the film. It has a fun, throwback quality to it that actively calls to mind the first Star Wars film.


#8: Inherent Vice

Inherent Vice has a number of great looking posters floating around out there, all of them adopting the neon color scheme of this one. It's a bit seedy, kind of beautiful, and a great, evocative piece of artwork (all of them are).


#7: Night Moves

Night Moves, like all of Kelly Reichardt's work, possesses a stripped down aesthetic, which makes this the perfect visual representation of what it's about. Ostensibly a story about ecoterrorism, it's really about loneliness and alienation, and the poster strikes a nice balance between expressing the major event of the film's plot and the psychological space of the characters.


#6: Enemy

Enemy is a strange movie and deserving of a strange, visually striking poster. It's a great visual representation for a story which quite possibly takes place entirely in the protagonist's head, and it incorporates the creepiest/most WTF element of the film (the spider).


#5: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

A bonobo riding a horse and carrying a machine gun. Could anything say "summer event movie" better than this? There are a few posters for the film which feature variations of Caesar's face with war paint, but I think that this one speaks a little more to the genre pleasures that Dawn of the Planet of the Apes has to offer.


#4: A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night

A little macabre and suggestively gruesome, the color blocking scheme is simple but effective. If A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night weren't already on my wishlist of films to see, this poster would be enough to get it there.


#3: Birdman

Kudos to Birdman's publicity department because this film has a ton of great posters representing it.  Click here for a look at a series of posters specific to US cities (plus Toronto, in what I assume is an unintentional joke that only Canadians will get) and here for the international city posters. I like this poster the most, but only by a small margin.


#2: Nightcrawler

Nightcrawler's poster has the lurid quality of a pulp novel, which is entirely fitting. Nightcrawler is a sensationalist tale of a man who traffics in violence and gore in order to get ahead, and clearly sees himself as the star of a motivational video and everyone around him as the audience, so this poster, which puts focuses exclusively on him, is perfect.


#1: Winter Sleep

I haven't seen Winter Sleep yet (soon, hopefully), but if it's as gorgeous as this poster then I'm in for a treat. Gloomy as it is, that is a beautifully rendered image.

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