Above: Original French release poster for Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, Belgium, 1975). Designer unknown.
Jeanne Dielman wins again! Posted on the day that Chantal Akerman’s masterpiece was announced as the surprise come-from-behind winner of Sight and Sound’s decennial Greatest Films of All Time poll, the original poster for the film racked up close to 3,000 likes on my Movie Poster of the Day Instagram (helped perhaps by being paired with this photo of Akerman pensively smoking in front of the same poster back in the day). I have no doubt that any poster for the film posted on that day would have gotten a lot of attention, but I’d like to believe that some of the likes were for the poster itself: unassuming yet elegant (like JD herself), foregrounding that radically mundane title, and containing nothing surplus to requirements, just Mrs. Dielman at her dining room table, waiting patiently, knowing her time will come.
As I’ve been doing for the past few years, every six months or so I like to collect and rank the most liked posters that I have posted in the previous 26 weeks or more as some sort of gauge of popular taste. The results usually sort out the wheat from the chaff (though there are a lot of great posters left in the chaff) and these 30 (five more than usual because that bottom five is just so good) make for a pretty stunning, if eclectic, collection. Jeanne Dielman was number one, but close behind, shy only a few hundred likes, was another femme fatale: Irma Vep. That French grande watched over my desk at Zeitgeist Films for many years and I had posted it last September to mark Maggie Cheung’s birthday.
Of the 30, fourteen are new posters, twelve of them for new films, and two for re-releases (1988’s Tales from the Gimli Hospital and 1959’s 400 Blows, notably the oldest film represented here). There are four posters from the ’60s, five from the ’70s, and a couple from each decade after that.
I don’t usually post fan art—preferring to concentrate on theatrical release posters—but Maks Bereski’s exquisite home-made poster for The Fabelmans was just too good to ignore, and a necessary corrective to the official release poster. James Jean’s pencil-drawn, A24-sanctioned alternative poster for The Whale should also have been the official release poster for that film. Had it been, it would have been my favorite poster of 2022.
Anyway, without further ado, here are the rest of the 30 most-liked posters of the past six months of Movie Poster of the Day, presented, as always, in gently descending order of popularity.
Above: French grande for Irma Vep (Olivier Assayas, France, 1996). Design by Benjamin Baltimore.
Above: Alternative poster for The Whale (Darren Aronofsky, USA, 2022). Art by James Jean.
Above: Fan art poster for The Fabelmans (Steven Spielberg, USA, 2022). Design by Maks Bereski, a.k.a. Plakiat. A high resolution version of this can be downloaded for free from Plakiat’s website.
Above: 2022 USA re-release poster for The 400 Blows (François Truffaut, France, 1959). One of a series of posters for the Antoine Doinel films. Art by Tom Haugomat.
Above: 2022 teaser/character poster for White Noise (Noah Baumbach, USA, 2022). Design by Hector John Guerra for P+A.
Above: UK quad for Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, UK, 1966). Designer unknown.
Above: 2023 one sheet for Walk Up (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea, 2022). Design by Brian Hung.
Above: USA one sheet for Asteroid City (Wes Anderson, USA, 2023). Designer TBD.
Above: Original mock-up art for Jules and Jim (François Truffaut, France, 1962). Art by Christian Broutin. This just came up for auction at the end of last year. Read my 2012 interview with Broutin here.
Above: USA one sheet for Godland (Hlynur Pálmason, Iceland/Denmark, 2022). Designer TBD.
Above: USA one sheet for The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (Sophie Fiennes, UK, 2012). Art and design by Akiko Stehrenberger. Art direction by yours truly. (Posted on Akiko’s birthday.)
Above: 2017 fan poster by Coke Navarro for The Handmaiden (Park Chan-wook, South Korea, 2016). See my article on fan art for the films of Park Chan-wook here.
Above: 1974 Cuban silkscreen poster for The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, USA, 1972). Art by Antonio Perez Gonzalez, a.k.a. Ñiko.
Above: USA one sheet for De Humani Corporis Fabrica (Verena Paravel & Lucien Castaing-Taylor, USA, 2022). Design by Midnight Marauder.
Above: UK quad for Aftersun (Charlotte Wells, UK, 2022). Designed by MUBI LAB with photo-illustration by Intermission.
Above: 1965 Hungarian poster for Cléo from 5 to 7 (Agnès Varda, France, 1962). Design by Lajos Görög. Another poster posted to celebrate the Sight and Sound poll in which Varda’s film was the highest new entry in the Top 100 at number 14.
Above: USA one sheet for Showing Up (Kelly Reichardt, USA, 2022). Design by Brian O’Dell for P+A.
Above: USA one sheet for King Lear (Jean-Luc Godard, France/USA, 1987). Designer unknown. Posted to mark Godard’s passing.
Above: French grande for Cannabis, a.k.a. French Intrigue, a.k.a. The Mafia Wants Blood (Pierre Koralnik, France, 1970). Art by Georges Allard.
Above: 1972 Czech poster for The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci, Italy, 1970). Design by Miroslav Pechánek.
Above: Japanese chirashi for Buffalo ’66 (Vincent Gallo, USA, 1998). Designer unknown.
Above: UK poster for Broker (Hirokazu Koreeda, Japan, 2022). Design by Klaus Kremmerz.
Above: French poster for Home (Ursula Meier, Switzerland, 2008). Designer unknown. Posted to mark Huppert’s 70th birthday.
Above: USA one sheet for The Year Between (Alex Heller, USA, 2022). Design by Midnight Marauder.
Above: French grande for Four Nights of a Dreamer (Robert Bresson, France, 1971). Designer unknown.
Above: 1966 Japanese poster for Juliet of the Spirits (Federico Fellini, Italy, 1965). Designer unknown.
Above: 1986 Polish poster for The Fly (David Cronenberg, Canada, 1986). Design by Eugeniusz Skorwider. Posted to mark Cronenberg’s 80th birthday.
Above: 2022 teaser poster for Armageddon Time (James Gray, USA, 2022). Design by Sister Hyde, a.k.a. Drusilla Adeline for Grandson.
Above: Unused 2022 poster design for Tales from the Gimli Hospital Redux (Guy Maddin, Canada, 1988/2022). Art and design by Galen Johnson.
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