Above: Mondo poster for The Graduate (Mike Nichols, USA, 1967); artist: Rory Kurtz; lettering: Jay Shaw.
On my daily movie poster Tumblr I don’t make a habit of posting fan art or art prints—call them what you will—because I’m most interested in the intersection of commerce and art that is the theatrical movie poster. But I make an exception when something stands out, and nothing stood out last year quite like Rory Kurtz’s beautiful, elegant and unexpected Mondo illustration for The Graduate, which quite rightly racked up over 200 more likes than even its nearest competitor. But its nearest competitor was fan art too: a brilliant poster for Badlands by the insanely talented Adam Juresko, whose art poster for In the Mood for Love (featured in my Maggie Cheung article) was also in the top four. What makes art posters easy to like—beyond their extraordinary artistry—is the fact that they are referencing an already-beloved work and not trying to sell an unknown quantity. Which makes the top four appearance of a lesser known film—Paul Kyriazi’s 70s dystopian sci-fi Death Machines—all the more interesting. The top 20, sadly as always, has a couple of in memoriam entries: for Carrie Fisher and Andrzej Wajda. It also has a handful of posters for new films, including two designed by the artist known as Midnight Marauder and one—The Ornithologist—which made my Top Ten posters of the year. And there is also one very old poster—the lovely Deco design for 1924’s Lilies of the Field—which I posted because it appears in a new film: on Emma Stone’s bedroom wall in La La Land (a film chock-full of posters, though that one would have set her character back a bit since it sold at auction in 2009 for $1,195).
So feast your eyes on The Graduate above, and below see the rest of the Top 20 of the past quarter (actually the past four months, since I slacked off in the post-election daze), in gently descending order of popularity.
Above: Art poster for Badlands (Terrence Malick, USA, 1973); designer: Adam Juresko.
Above: US one sheet for Death Machines (Paul Kyriazi, USA, 1976); designer: unknown.
Above: Castro Theatre poster for In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong, 2000); designer: Adam Juresko.
Above: US Style B one sheet for Return of the Jedi (Richard Marquand, USA, 1983); artist: Kazuhiko Sano.
Above: US one sheet for The Children’s Hour (William Wyler, USA, 1962); designer: unknown.
Above: US one sheet for Lilies of the Field (John Francis Dillon, USA, 1924); artist: uncredited.
Above: 1985 Japanese poster for Ran (Akira Kurosawa, Japan, 1985); designer: unknown.
Above: US one sheet for Raw (Julia Ducournau, France, 2016); designer: P+A.
Above: US one sheet for Weirdos (Bruce McDonald, Canada, 2016); designer: Midnight Marauder.
Above: Japanese poster for Irreversible (Gaspar Noé, France, 2002); designer: unknown.
Above: Czech poster for ASSA (Sergey Solovev, USSR, 1988); designer: Jan S. Tomanek.
Above: Japanese poster for The Bad News Bears (Michael Ritchie, USA, 1976); designer: unknown.
Above: British quad for Fahrenheit 451 (François Truffaut, UK, 1966); designer: unknown.
Above: Polish poster for Man of Iron (Andrzej Wajda, Poland, 1981); artist: Rafal Olbinski.
Above: Japanese poster for The Ornithologist (João Pedro Rodrigues, Portugal, 2016); artist: Philippe Morin; designer: Igor Ramos.
Above: US one sheet for Theo Who Lived (David Schisgall, USA, 2016); designer: Brandon Schaefer.
Above: US one sheet for I Am Not a Serial Killer (Billy O’Brien, USA, 2016); designer: Midnight Marauder.
Above: 1991 Polish poster for Down by Law (Jim Jarmusch, USA, 1996); designer: Andrzej Klimowski.
Above: Polish poster for Yield to the Night aka Blonde Sinner (J. Lee Thompson, UK, 1956); designer: Ewa Frysztak.
Poster sources are all credited on Movie Poster of the Day; click on the titles above for more information.
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