Notebook Year in Review illustrations by Niklas Wesner.
In anticipation of this roundup every year, some friends speculate about what I might be including in my annual Top Ten list and often remark that they can’t recall many particular standouts from the current year. While I was compiling the 2025 column, I realized that in order to complete this list—traditionally, my ten favorite commercially released posters for films that were theatrically released in the current year—I have ended up sneaking in a few exceptions to the original rule, like alternate posters, festival promos, and television one-sheets. But talent will out, and this year, a lot of the best work has been done on the margins. I do usually steer clear of fan-generated posters, partly because it would be too easy to find ten amazing pieces of work in that realm that trounce most of the commercial work out there, and partly because I am most interested in what the marketplace will allow and who most adroitly pushes the corners of that envelope, but the one alt poster that I included this year is here for a reason which I hope I suitably explain below.
So without further ado, here are my top ten favorite movie posters of 2025, and twenty runners-up.
1. Bugonia
Not Vasilis Marmatakis’s primary official poster for Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest, but my favorite by far, this alternate design for Bugonia was featured in a very insightful recent interview with Marmatakis by Arman Khan on the design website It’s Nice That, and has also appeared in magazine ads. The poster—which is a little reminiscent in its scale of layout and surreal montage to another that Marmatakis designed this year, for Kim Deal’s Richard Ayoade–directed “Big Ben Beat” music video—is a fabulous collaboration of talents. The boxy angular typography, featured on every Bugonia poster and the film itself, is Churchward Roundsquare, designed by the late Samoan-born New Zealand typographer Joseph Churchward and gently roughed up by Marmatakis, while the swirling, dripping watercolor is the work of British painter Clare Chapman. The photography is by Atsushi Nishijima, and it is all brought together by the genius ringmaster that is Vasilis Marmatakis. He is definitely having even more of a moment than usual, with a feature in the New York Times which resulted in belated Instagram recognition from graphic design maven Michael Bierut (“How great is Vasilis Marmatakis?”). But devoted readers of Movie Poster of the Week have been fans of his from way back. I was also lucky enough to work directly with Vasilis this year, on the poster for the 4K rerelease of Lanthimos’s Dogtooth (2009), which only a desire to include the work of other designers precludes me from adding here too.
2. Telluride Film Festival poster
I don’t usually feature film festival posters in this list, but this is too good to ignore. It is the work of the great American cartoonist Daniel Clowes, who to my knowledge has only previously lent his talent to two other film-related posters: the one sheet for Todd Solondz’s Happiness in 1998, and a promo poster for the opening of the Sunshine Cinema on New York’s Lower East Side in 2001. The latter is one of my favorite posters (it is propped up against a wall in my office) and it’s been a long quarter of a century wait for a new movie-related Clowes design. Full of detail and color and Clowes’s impeccable sense of space and use of lettering, this is magnificent.
3. Dracula
I wasn’t sure what to make of this rather crude illustration for Radu Jude’s Dracula until I discovered (thanks to Stan Oh at Posteritati) that it’s actually a photograph of a handmade beef salad and then I thought it was the greatest thing I’d seen since sliced lunch meat. Showcasing the craftsmanship of one Mariana Grigoruță, a Romanian lady who is apparently the “queen of beef salads,” the poster shows Vlad the Impaler made out of olives, peppers, semolina, and slices of beef. Jude had seen Grigoruță on TV and commissioned her to create this gastronomic work of art for the poster. One of the many remarkable things about it is is that the film, which Jessica Kiang of Film Comment called “an almost three-hour burp in the face of good taste,” is about a frustrated filmmaker who turns to AI in order to make a film about Dracula. It is quite lovely then that Jude turned to the most homespun and non-digital of means to create the poster for the film when he had the perfect thematic excuse to ask a chatbot to make it for him. With photography by Emanuel Lupascu, title design by Dragos Botcau, and layout by Dimitrie Tuduciuc and Raluca Munteanu.
4. Hard Truths and 5. Jay Kelly
Two posters that go so well together, each brilliant in its own right: Desi Moore’s Clio-winning illustrated poster for Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths (2024), which was unveiled at the very beginning of this year. And Aleksander Walijewski’s illustrated poster for Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, which just dropped a couple of weeks ago. Mike Leigh, one of my very favorite filmmakers, has rarely been blessed with great posters—the illustrated British quad for Topsy-Turvy (1999) being a notable exception—so it was a treat to get this new design long after the film’s 2024 festival debut, as well as a beautiful portrait of the great Marianne Jean-Baptiste. And Walijewski’s Jay Kelly is yet another in the Polish artist’s repertoire of artfully distorted heads. Both designs signify an unraveling, and both films are about people struggling: one with immense undiagnosed psychic pain, the other with the most first world of problems.
6. Eddington and One Battle After Another
Even though they’re not by the same artist, I’m lumping these two posters together for fairly obvious reasons (color palette, coincidences of content, facial similarities...), not least to show that this particular style, oft-derided, can work beautifully when done well. In Drew (2013), the documentary about the late, great poster artist Drew Struzan, George Lucas refers to this style, popularized by Struzan, as “the mountain of people” or “the pyramid.” Eddington actually premiered at Cannes with a quite different teaser poster, designed by GrandSon, in which buffalo tumble off a cliff like lemmings, accompanied by the brilliant tag line “Hindsight is 2020.” Prior to its theatrical opening, A24 and GrandSon ended up releasing this more conventional but quite beautiful illustrated poster for Eddington, with artwork by Jack C. Gregory (who last year painted the poster for Azazel Jacobs’s His Three Daughters (2023)). One Battle After Another, on the other hand, debuted with a very underwhelming photo-based poster that promised very little and certainly did not herald the universally loved film of the year that OBAA turned out to be. In the absence of an official poster that would get people excited for the movie, Italian artist Alessandro Montalto took it upon himself to make his own, also in the “mountain of people” style. His design quickly caught on with fans of the film, and went viral as the preferred key art of choice.
7. The Love That Remains
Created by the designer Daniel Imsland, who also made a nice selection of merch for the Icelandic film’s Cannes debut, this poster takes an idea that Célie Cadieux used for her poster for Between Goodbyes (included in last year’s roundup), that of the carefully torn photograph, used to signify dislocation, and takes it a step further, discarding the ripped-out image of the father on the outside of the frame. The striking main image of a family marooned on top of a sinking jeep has been constructed for the poster—it doesn’t appear in the film, which is a lovely quotidian drama of family dissolution with surreal touches—but the graphic banishment of the father, who is estranged from his wife but always looking for a way back into his family, is the master stroke. And the folded paper is a nice extra touch.
8. The Oslo Trilogy
The UK distributor of Dag Johan Haugerud’s Oslo Trilogy, Modern Films, released the three films with an elegant trio of color-coded posters designed by Bobo Creative, but it is these quirkier, hand-drawn posters commissioned by Strand Releasing in the US that I particularly love. They are designed by Kustom Creative and the illustrations are by Jay Hartmann, who calls himself “a painter of intimate and mundane moments of the sublime, focusing on the relationships between bodies and materials.”
9. The Chair Company
As with festival posters, I don’t usually include TV posters in this list, but there have been some very good ones this year, including those for Netflix’s Too Much and for Apple TV’s Pluribus, which are among my runners-up below. But this one is especially close to my heart, partly because I think The Chair Company is one of the best TV shows of the year (though one’s appreciation of it may depend upon one’s love of Tim Robinson; mine just happens to run deep) but also because of its designer. Back in February I interviewed Kenny Gravillis, whose self-named company was behind this, and talked to him about Access, the scholarship program that he cofounded with Dawn Baillie, run by Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles and sponsored by Netflix, that gives young students of color an invaluable pipeline to an entertainment design career, offering scholarships, mentorship, and apprenticeships. The very talented illustrator and designer of the Chair Company poster, Blaze Bautista, came through the Access program, apprenticed at Gravillis, and, in her first two months after being hired full-time, knocked out this home run, which she described in a joyous Instagram post as a last-minute pitch in her personal style.
10. Grand Tour and By The Stream
And finally, a photo finish between two more posters that are mini masterpieces in their own right but which go so well together it’s ridiculous: Irene Lee’s design for MUBI for Miguel Gomes’s Grand Tour, and Brian Hung’s for Cinema Guild for Hong Sangsoo’s By the Stream. Both use tiny cut-out photographs of people against an undulating illustrated background of painterly parallel lines representing water. I’ll give the slight edge to Grand Tour for its exquisite typography, magenta highlights (a bold choice), and also because the film is one of my favorites of the year. As the artist behind my very favorite poster of last year, Hung probably won’t mind.
20 Runners-Up (in no particular order beyond an aesthetic one)
Runner-up posters above designed or illustrated by Lysa Le (Drowning Dry), Sam Smith (Shifting Baselines), BOND (The Bride), Intermission Film (Köln 75), Huang Kuo-jui (Eel), Alex Phoenix (Flow), Andrea Ventura with handwritten title by Claudia Zengel (B for Bartleby), Kamonlak Sukchai with lettering and design by Smich Smanloh and Cadson Demak (A Useful Ghost), Midnight Marauder (The President’s Cake), Grace Attanasio (Artists in Residence), Brandon Schaefer for JumpCut (Television Event), Bangers and Mash (Sirât), Intermission Film (Too Much), designer TBD (Twiggy), Igor Ramos (Mississipis), The Refinery (This is Spinal Tap), Akiko Stehrenberger with title design by Sander Brouwer (Armand), GrandSon with illustration by Mike Koelsch (Pluribus), Caspar Newbolt (In Hell with Ivo), and Eric White (The Life of Chuck).
You can see my all previous Best of the Year articles here: 2024; 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.
Continue reading Notebook’s 2025 Year in Review.