The Best Posters of 2023

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Another great year of cinema has passed, with wonderful posters accompanying extraordinary films. From “Saltburn” to Ghibli’s “Boy and the Crane”, there have been many graphic design triumphs in the last twelve months.

Much applause is given to the art of cinema, that seventh wonder that delights us so much at 24 frames per second. However, other artistic feats orbit around him, even when they are encompassed in a commercial project. All this to say that there is value in advertising beyond the mercenary. Thinking about cinema posters, we managed to find in their designs a way to invoke mystery and interest, sometimes even the ability to summarize ineffable ideas in a single image. So many times, we come across posters that summarize the tone of your film, enticing the viewer with aesthetic promises.

For this reason, we thought it would be good to include posters in our end-of-year lists, to better analyze this underrated art of posters and, at the same time, continue promoting films. That said, we might want to make a few honorable mentions before we dive into the top 10 itself. For example, despite not being bold graphic proposals, we have to love the many “Barbie.” The use of taglines Cunning and the ease with which the established model could become a meme helped make the tape a cultural phenomenon. The character posters are especially fantastic, especially the one dedicated to the titular figure.

Another great campaign was the one given to “Saltburn,” the new film by Emerald Fennell whose “A Girl with Potential” was a huge success in 2020. Despite having divided critics, this second provocation from the director captivated many viewers, in part because the vampiric aesthetic of her story has something to do with it. which refers to seduction. The posters are proof of this, eroticizing the male figures in the plot and expanding on Linus Sandgren’s wonderful photography. There is a deliberate touch of cliché in the graphics, an appeal to the genesis and heyday of Tumblr in past decades. If it doesn’t work as a cinematographic work, “Saltburn” certainly succeeds as a magazine editorial. Just look at their posters.

Ultimately, both “Barbie” and “Saltburn” are honorable mentions because the impact of their posters has to be experienced as a collective. There is no singular design that rises above the others. The same doesn’t happen with our top 10. But enough talk, let’s move on to the countdown. The best posters of 2023 are…

This title was Sweden’s choice to represent the country in the Oscars. It is a story of repression and immigration, focusing on a family of Iranian refugees seeking asylum in the Scandinavian land. Essentially, it is the drama of a homosexual man confronting his sexuality, inside and outside the ring where he makes his living as a fighter. The intertwining of violence and eroticism is summarized in the poster, through the collision of skin and muscles, the communion of the body, of forbidden desire.

The advertising campaign that Netflix assembled for Todd Haynes’ new film is an example of tonal astuteness. Rising above the critical debate over the comedic nature of the film, the posters for “May December” made the camp, with games of mirrors and references. This particular example pays homage to two important inspirations. They are Bergman’s “Persona” and Almodóvar’s “Fala com Ela”. It is a shameless pastiche, a brilliant imitation that, in the blink of an eye, sells the perversity of melodrama.

This work by Hong Sang-soo was filmed in a very curious way. The director chose to present the film out of focus, alternating levels of distortion with some scenes quite discernible and others blurred to the point of abstraction. To publicize a work like this, you have to use your imagination. This is how this poster came about, a painting that suggests the blur in another medium while at the same time making reference to the last scene in the tape. It’s one of those images that catches your attention at first glance, but then takes on new meaning once you’ve seen it.”In Water.”

O documentary Claire Simon’s latest explores the female body through precise observation, with the camera between doctors and patients in a Parisian hospital. It is a multifaceted film that, at a certain point, places the director herself as the subject of its study. This quality is evident in the illustrated poster, with a version of the filmmaker between the various parts of a symbolic Matrioska.

After decades out of the spotlight, Victor Erice returned to theaters with “Close Your Eyes,” his new triumph. The story told in the tape reflects much of this legacy, being essentially a thesis, perhaps a poem, about the powers and limits of cinema as a materialization of memory. Miracles are performed in this film – à la Dreyer – and the climax takes place in front of the screen, when the spectator and what he sees touch. By making the gesture literal, the poster not only references Bergman but also offers us a Rosetta Stone for understanding the Spanish masterpiece.

To promote Hayao Miyazaki’s new film, the Studio Ghibli took an unexpected action. Basically, they refused to do much publicity, not revealing any image other than this sketchy poster, whose decontextualized detail does not allow us to have a concrete idea of ​​the character represented in it. The objective was to create mystery, to sell the work based solely on its author. It was a risky bet, but it paid off. “The Boy and the Crane” is a masterpiece and its first poster is a perfect enigma.

Jonathan Glazer is one of the most daring filmmakers working today and his “Zone of Interest” does not neglect provocation. With a cold, clinical look, without passion or compassion, he observes the daily life of the captain of Auschwitz during the Holocaust, his wife and the rest of his family. But we never look beyond the high walls, enclosed in the hollow idyll of the Aryan people. We always know what is happening, we hear the horror, but our eyes are on the false Eden of that garden. The poster summarizes all of this in graphic synthesis, a pastel landscape where the sky becomes a black hole, an absolute void. The contrast is disconcerting, distressing, and gives us a good taste of what awaits us if we risk seeing the nightmare of this “Zone of Interest.”

Most of the posters for “Killers of the Flower Moon” are an artistically uninspired sadness. However, after the misery came a miracle. This is a painting signed by Addie Roanhorse, an ambassador for the Osage Nation. The work focuses on Mollie’s figure, but it could be a tribute to all Osage women, her dark hair over the blanket worn like a striped cloak. Simple and powerful, as beautiful as it is desolate, the poster is the heartbreak of the film in the blink of an eye.

Continuing with posters created by renowned artists beyond the advertising sphere, we have this example of “A Thousand and One.” With paint Desi Moore, the poster of this Sundance champion is a stylized portrait of its main figures, accentuating the role of motherhood in the proposed narrative. But there is something angular and uncomfortable about the pose, a beauty that hurts and suggests greater tensions than the model of the Virgin and Child. The poster remains in our memory, calling us to the film as the mermaids sang of the sailors’ doom.

Vasilis Marmatakis has designed the posters for practically all of Yorgos Lanthimos’ films. His normal style tends to fall towards minimalism, with white cutouts and backgrounds, the contrast of emptiness with strong black lines. But for the Victorian madness of “Poor Creatures,” that approach would be wrong. Therefore, fortunes and models changed, calling more for opulence and also for the grotesque. From there came a series of great designs, this being the best of them all. For anyone who has seen the film, the duplicated image of Emma Stone will make perfect sense, a perverse summary of her fate on the tape. How glorious – wouldn’t you love to have this displayed on your wall? We do.

Dear readers, what do you think of this list? What other posters deserve to be celebrated in this end-of-year context?