Illustration by Stephanie Lane Gage.
While working on this list and thinking about why my favorite posters stand out from the thousands of others made each year, I came up with one simple maxim: a great idea beautifully executed. There are plenty of good movie posters out there that do the job they need to do; they tell you what the movie is and make you want to see it. Does a new blockbuster like Wicked need an especially clever poster? No. It needs to tell you that it is Wicked, that Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo are in it, and it needs to look luxe. But the posters that I love best go above and beyond mere glossy functionality. They have a smart concept that is about more than just showing and telling, and they execute it perfectly, down to the placement of every piece of type and every contractually obligated element of the poster (a badly placed billing block can ruin a good poster, after all). So without further ado, here are my favorite movie posters of 2024.
1. A Traveler’s Needs
I’ve been proselytizing about Brian Hung’s Hong Sang-soo house style posters for Cinema Guild for years now, but this may be his best yet. It’s also a bit of a departure from his usual style, which tends to feature isolated figures dotted against a spare background. His poster for A Traveler’s Needs does something similar, but it is more baroque, with Hung’s ornate, hand-drawn, faux-naif background filling the entire space with a swathe of green. The star of the film, Isabelle Huppert, who plays an indigent and very eccentric French teacher in Korea, is plonked down on a rock in the bottom right corner of the poster, taking up less than ten percent of the real estate (which, in the era of streaming thumbnails, is a radical act in itself). But with her pink and purple sundress she pops off the page. And the simple sans serif type—just the title and Huppert’s and Hong’s names—is the perfect complement. Gorgeous at just a first glance, the poster rewards careful attention. The lights on the skyscrapers of Seoul in the distance turn out to be the credit block, which is nearly unreadable except in full printed size. The laurel leaves around Berlin and NYFF are made from the branches in the park surrounding them, and, for Korean readers only, the synopsis of the film is written on the rock. Once you’ve seen the film, other details start to make sense: the bottle of makgeolli, a Korean rice wine that Huppert’s character loves to consume; the green of the background mimicking the green cardigan that she wears throughout the film (and whose love of the color is commented on at one point because she also wraps her pen in green tape); and the writing on the rock mimicking the engraved poetry that she has translated for her by one of her students. Even the mountains in the far distance are featured in the film. All in all, this poster is a work of art (my wife mentioned its resemblance to Gustav Klimt’s The Park) and a perfect representation of its subject.
2. The Zone of Interest and 3. Poor Things
I know The Zone of Interest and Poor Things were last year’s news—posters for both were included in my 2023 top ten—but their long shadows extended well into 2024. Neil Kellerhouse, who designed the original Zone of Interest poster, released a number of highly unusual alternate posters for the film in March, but it was this genius design by the prodigiously talented Polish artist Aleksander Walijewski, which he shared in April, that blew me away. As with A Traveler’s Needs, the poster is defined by its female star and an item of clothing that is worn in the film. Here it is a fur coat that Sandra Hüller’s commandant’s wife steals from one of the victims of her husband’s death camp and Walijewski brilliantly, chillingly, has the fur made from the smoke from Auschwitz’s furnaces. Walijewski also made a beautiful alternate poster for Poor Things, and his disembodied head of Emma Stone, carried aloft by her transmogrified admirers, became by far the most-liked poster ever on Movie Poster of the Day, doubling its nearest competitor (which was Vasilis Marmatakis’s original Poor Things teaser).
4. The Apprentice and 5. A Different Man
It is a happy coincidence that two of the most inventive posters of the year are for two very different Sebastian Stan vehicles. One is the inspired alternative poster by Plakiat, aka Maks Bereski, for Aaron Schimberg’s facial-difference thriller A Different Man (which A24 really should have used as their official poster for the film), in which Bereski conveys Stan’s character’s disfiguring facial condition with just some folds and wrinkles in the paper of the poster. The other is the poster for Ali Abbasi’s Donald Trump origin story The Apprentice, which I am bound to catch flak for for even including in this list because it is a poster partially created using generative AI. But what I love about the poster, designed by Danni Riddertoft, is how perfectly its gleaming surfaces and blatant fakery suits its subject in a way that might not be possible using any other technique. The Copenhagen-based Riddertoft told me that his Apprentice poster is “made with heavy Photoshop (100+ layers), 3 months of work and 3 different AI platforms. People don’t always know that, they think when mentioning AI, someone was lazy and just put in ‘Trump Gold poster’ as a prompt. That was not the case. Glad you caught it was indeed very intentional. As you can see in my other work, I’m not a ‘AI artist.’ But it fit the premise for the idea I had, inspired by cheap statues in Walmart, bad taste and Jeff Koons and Michael Jackson and Bubbles.” As Trump himself might say, I think it’s a perfect poster.
6. Pictures of Ghosts
If we’re splitting hairs, Sam Smith’s ingenious design for Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Pictures of Ghosts is a 2023 poster, but it debuted last December, just two days after I published my Best of 2023, so I’m counting it for this year. After all, the film didn’t open until the end of January. Pictures of Ghosts explores the filmmaker’s home city of Recife, Brazil, partly through memories of the city’s once plentiful movie theaters and their marquees, which, in hindsight, function as de facto time stamps in old photos. To reflect that, Smith’s design is an utterly unique and graphically rich type-salad that, as he has said, is “inspired by the newspaper movie ads that Kleber and I both clipped and saved as a child.”
7. Kinds of Kindness
The great Vasilis Marmatakis designed a whole raft of posters for Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest, starting with the enigmatic teaser, and ending with an image of a human head barnacled with hundreds of tiny Emma Stones that seemed to make people’s skin crawl. But in between, he fashioned eight brilliant and unsettling color-coded character posters (with photography by Atsushi Nishijima) that turned the actors’ own faces into nightmarish oversized masks.
8. Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World
Perhaps my favorite title treatment of the year is this one, scrawled on a pink bubblegum balloon in the center of a grainy, high-contrast monochrome photo. Long titles can be challenging for movie poster designers, but Maria Pestana Teixeira solves that problem with punkish aplomb. And the title itself perfectly matches the IDGAF insouciance of the image. I also love how the rigid grid of type, laurels, and logos frames the whole thing.
9. Between Goodbyes
And speaking of frames... Another brilliant design solution that speaks volumes without words. Celie Cadieux’s poster for the documentary Between Goodbyes tells the story of a Korean woman who was raised in the Netherlands after her family had been pressured to give her up as a baby, and who struggles to reconnect with her birth family as an adult, but you almost don’t need to be told that when you see this elegant poster that conveys loneliness, dislocation, alienation, regret, and difference with just two photos, one ingeniously torn.
10. The End
The official poster for Joshua Oppenheimer’s apocalyptic musical The End seems to be a deliberate nod to a very similar poster, made fifteen years earlier, for Luca Guadagnino’s I Am Love (which, coincidentally, was my joint-favorite poster of 2010). Both feature an ornate (and very similar) oversized title treatment, all swashes and curlicues, that falls off the edge of the page and surrounds a photo of Tilda Swinton sitting stoically in a well-appointed drawing room. But while I appreciate the reference by the designers at GrandSon, it is their character posters for the film that I love the most. In each, a framed portrait is encased in plastic wrap and hung on a slightly cracked gray wall. The End is about a wealthy family living out a civilization-ending event in the depths of a salt mine, and paintings wrapped in plastic are glimpsed in the trailer, but even without that knowledge, these hermetically sealed portraits give you a beautiful sense of privilege embalmed.
20 Runners-Up (in no particular order beyond an aesthetic one)
Runner-up posters above designed or illustrated by Midnight Marauder (Alok), Lysa Le (Mami Wata), Empire Design (Back to Black), Iljen Put (Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat), Brian J. Hung (Moving), Build (Eno), F. Ron Miller (Matt and Mara), Matt Willey for Pentagram (If You’re Happy), Madison Coby and Jack Crossing (A Real Pain), Caspar Newbolt (April), Derek Gabryszak and Hannah Christ (Universal Language), Gordon Landenberger (Stress Positions), Lou Benesch (Frewaka), Julian Schnabel (Basquiat), Gravillis (Thelma), Tony Stella (La Chimera), Sam Smith (Nocturnes), Brandon Schaefer (Sasquatch Sunset), GrandSon (Longlegs), and Huang Hai (Black Dog).
You can see my all previous Best of the Year articles here: 2023; 2022; 2021; 2020; 2019; 2018; 2017; 2016; 2015; 2014; 2013; 2012; 2011; 2010; 2009. And if you’re new to this site, do check out my Movie Poster of the Week columns on Notebook, and my daily Movie Poster of the Day posts on Instagram.