Above: The Assassin (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan).
Until this gorgeous new poster for Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Assassin was unveiled this week, I was pretty sure that the best poster of the 2015 New York Film Festival was going to be the same as the best poster of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, namely either one of the negative-space hugging posters for Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster. But the Assassin poster, while not being as clever as those designs, is just as ravishing as I expect HHH’s film to be.
There are a few other standouts this year such as the posters for Miguel Gomes’ Arabian Nights, Apichatpong Weeasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendor and Guy Maddin’s The Forbidden Room, all of which have been knocking around since their festival debuts at Cannes and Sundance. But one of my favorite new discoveries is the illustrated art for Jia Zhangke’s Mountains May Depart. And the poster for Robert Zemeckis’ The Walk, which opens the festival on Saturday, is a vertiginous marvel.
Out of 26 films in the festival’s main slate (28 if you count Arabian Nights as three films) I have managed to find posters for 22 (or 24). The four that I could not find any key art for at all were Maggie’s Plan (Rebecca Miller, USA) and the three documentaries Don’t Blink - Robert Frank (Laura Israel, USA), No Home Movie (Chantal Akerman, Belgium), and Where to Invade Next (Michael Moore, USA). To be honest, the art for Don Cheadle’s Miles Ahead is a teaser poster that was made four years ago before shooting had even begun—and when the title was just Miles—but it was too good not to use.
Posters are presented below in alphabetical order by English-language title.
Above: Arabian Nights Volume I-III (Miguel Gomes, Portugal).
Above: Bridge of Spies (Steven Spielberg, USA).
Above: Brooklyn (John Crowley, UK/Ireland).
Above: Carol (Todd Haynes, USA).
Above: Cemetery of Splendour (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand).
Above: Les Cowboys (Thomas Bidegain, France).
Above: Experimenter (Michael Almereyda, USA).
Above: The Forbidden Room (Guy Maddin & Evan Johnson, Canada).
Above: In the Shadow of Women (Philippe Garrel, France).
Above: Journey to the Shore (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan/France).
Above: The Lobster (Yorgos Lanthimos, Greece).
Above: The Measure of a Man (Stephane Brizé, France).
Above: Mia Madre (Nanni Moretti, Italy).
Above: Microbe & Gasoline (Michel Gondry, France).
Above: 2011 teaser poster for Miles Ahead (Don Cheadle, USA) by Heath Killen.
Above: Mountains May Depart (Jia Zhangke, China).
Above: My Golden Days (Arnaud Desplechin, France).
Above: Right Now, Wrong Then (Hong Sangsoo, South Korea).
Above: Steve Jobs (Danny Boyle, USA).
Above: The Treasure (Corneliu Porumboiu, Romania).
Above: The Walk (Robert Zemeckis, USA).
You can see previous New York Film Festival poster round-ups here: 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 1988, 1963.