As many of my friends and colleagues get set to navigate the maze of cinephilia that is the Cannes Film Festival, I have once again attempted to give the viewers at home a road map to the proceedings by rounding up as many posters as possible for the films in Competition for the Palme d’Or.
This year I have found posters for 13 of the 19 films so far. By far the most buzzed about posters—and deservedly so—are the striking duo unveiled last week for Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster, which show Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz tenderly embracing negative space in striking monochrome.
Outside the main slate, the festival has already thrown up another couple of gems in the lovely and mysterious new poster for Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendour, and the near-perfect one sheet for Kent Jones’s Hitchcock/Truffaut, which also makes nice use of negative space. And then of course, in a league of its own, there is Gaspar Noé’s no-holds-barred, NSFW poster for Love.
The Competition posters themselves are the usual mixed bag, some of them hastily thrown together to meet the festival deadline. The two posters for Matteo Garrone’s fantastical Italian fable Tale of Tales are far more polished than most. I was especially taken with the maze design inhabited by that tiny lady in red (or at least I was until I found this on Shutterstock). The other, more conventional poster seems designed to appeal to fans of Game of Thrones.
The rest of the Competition films are presented below in an approximate order of appreciation.
Above: Umimachi Diary (Our Little Sister) by Hirokazu Kore-eda, Japan.
Above: Louder Than Bombs by Joachim Trier, Norway.
Above: Sicario by Denis Villeneuve, USA.
Above: Son of Saul by László Nemes, Hungary.
Above: The Assassin by Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan.
Above: Youth by Paolo Sorrentino, Italy.
Above: Mountains May Depart by Jia Zhang-Ke, China.
Above: Mia Madre by Nanni Moretti, Italy.
Above: Macbeth by Justin Kurzel, UK.
Above: La Loi du marché (The Measure of a Man) by Stéphane Brizé, France.
Above: Valley of Love by Guillaume Nicloux, France.
Still to come: Chronic by Mexican director Michel Franco, three more French films—Dheepan by Jacques Audiard, Marguerite & Julien by Valérie Donzelli, and Mon Roi by Maïwenn—and the only two films by American directors in the Competition, Gus Van Sant’s The Sea of Trees and Todd Haynes’ Carol. Watch this space.
Previous Cannes Competition round-ups: 2014 | 2013 | 2012 | 2011