//

The 10 Best Movie Posters of 2014

Whether colorful or carefully composed, these posters aren’t just suggestions for adorning your home office or home-theater room.

Gone Girl

Although prominent displays of guns, guffaws, and gadgetry remain popular tropes among a majority of contemporary film posters, a select number each year are able to transcend such numbing repetition by carefully attuning the all-important singular image (and marketing tool) toward the specificities of the film at hand. Twenty fourteen is no different in that regard, with several of the posters listed (and shown) below providing not only compelling complimentary texts for the poster’s accompanying film, but, in some cases, more adeptly rendering the suggested themes than the film itself (Gone Girl, we’re looking at you). Whether colorful or carefully composed, these posters aren’t just suggestions for adorning your home office or home-theater room (though as such, they would be the shit), but meaningful additives to deepening dimensions for the films being marketed.

Honorable Menion



The 10 Best Movie Posters of 2014

Non-Stop

Liam Neeson is back—no literally, he’s falling backward in this kinetic poster for Non-Stop, still shooting at the terrorists even as his airplane hits zero gravity. It’s hard to think of a recent action-movie poster that so adeptly teases the promised foot-in-ass theatrics of its vaunted star’s grizzled persona.


The 10 Best Movie Posters of 2014

Night Moves

Kelly Reichardt’s Night Moves is calm, but undergirded by an unnerving sense of claustrophobia, much like its poster, which cleanly frames its trio of stars in juxtaposition with a dark nighttime sky, lit only by a distant full moon. The pull quotes and festival credentials are well placed and balanced, but it’s the framing, even imprisoning of the film’s protagonists that sharply aligns with Reichardt’s insistence that these characters are trapped, in time and space, by their actions and desires.


The 10 Best Movie Posters of 2014

The Purge: Anarchy

The “oh fuck”-ness of this poster for The Purge: Anarchy is off the charts, as “An American Tradition” is not only bound explicitly to one’s right to bear arms simply through colors and graphics, but also to violence as inextricable from the concept of patriotism itself. Grenades, brass knuckles, bowie knives, baseball bats, and AK-47s: land of the free, home of the knaves.


The 10 Best Movie Posters of 2014

10. John Wick

If genre films can be distilled down to a singular quality or essence, then this poster for John Wick understands that aim completely, much like the film itself, by offering a fourth-wall breach on the form of a gun barrel. The stand-in O nicely echoes the unfocused lights permeating a background of presumably urban hustle, with Keanu Reeves’s itchy trigger finger barely able to contain itself. This poster suggests the film as a bullet to the head. Indeed, what you see is what you get.

Advertisement


The 10 Best Movie Posters of 2014

9. The Rover

Although the one-sheet featuring Guy Pearce got most of the play, this B-side poster offers a stark image of Robert Pattinson in profile and is, overall, more in line with The Rover’s (and character’s) tone of a desperation not easily spoken. Indeed, Pattinson’s pursed lips and the jaundiced chiaroscuro are thoroughly convincing visual supplements to the poster’s declarative tagline. The only mistake is that pesky Cannes stamp of approval on Pattinson’s brow; otherwise, few still-image close-ups carry as much evocative anguish as this one.


The 10 Best Movie Posters of 2014

8. Inherent Vice

Featuring a neon-green font taken directly from the cover of Thomas Pynchon’s novel, this poster for Inherent Vice offers ’70s excess and sexism through a singular image of psychedelic color play, changing a sun-baked backside into dueling pink monuments that could make even pop artist Allen Jones blush. The film may be “coming soon” as promised, but ironically no one in Paul Thomas Anderson’s film is, as the film’s impotent collective of uneasy riders and possible pinkos are tersely suggested by the poster’s visual implications.


The 10 Best Movie Posters of 2014

7. Maleficent

Hand it to Disney for not beating around the Briar Rose bush: Maleficent is entirely about seeing a famous animated villain brought to life via Angelina Jolie’s decidedly devilish star persona. As such, Disney didn’t shy away from offering this initial teaser poster that revealed just how seriously they were intent on this endeavor, delivering a genuinely scary close-up of Jolie, whose green eyes and pale skin stand in direct contrast to those canonical, winding black horns. In fact, the poster promises an even creepier film than ultimately arrived, but that’s precisely what Disney needed to do: make the kiddies shake in their Keds.


The 10 Best Movie Posters of 2014

6. The Grand Budapest Hotel

Wes Anderson’s decidedly twee proclivities are literally shrunken in this lovely poster for The Grand Budapest Hotel, which offers a model of the film’s titular auberge that stands in complimentary contrast to the colorful, but legible, title and credits. While the extensive cast list suggests an updated Grand Hotel, the centered framing, symmetrical balance, and moose topiary work amusingly encompasses Anderson’s filmmaking sensibilities. Of course, no human faces are seen, but they’re there inside the hotel, with the poster’s sly variations (a red window here, a couple of yellow window there) suggesting human life behind the rigidly composed image.

Advertisement


The 10 Best Movie Posters of 2014

5. Under the Skin

In this sparse but voluminous poster for Under the Skin, the film’s title is buried just under the white frame that seemingly separates void from void, with neither the starry space containing Scarlett Johansson’s head or the white liter framing it a refuge from the abyss. This sense is most certainly heightened after seeing (and being scorched by) the film, but it’s not essential, as the poster’s force speaks for itself, with streaks of red and blue pithily suggesting a cover-up or disguise, makeup disfiguring what lies beneath. The really cool kids will be lining their dorm room walls with this one (or, in the case of yours truly, hanging it above an office desk).


The 10 Best Movie Posters of 2014

4. Actress

It’s rare that a documentary offers a compelling poster beyond a still image from the film with dutiful text and boilerplate pull quotes, but the poster for Robert Greene’s Actress defies all expectation in this regard by dispensing with said model entirely. Artist Laura Baran and designer Theresa Berens are responsible for this hand-drawn poster, which juxtaposes the bucolic and the domestic to compelling effect. The snow-covered train could be straight from a Thomas Kinkade—the artist most likely to adorn the walls of a suburban American home, given the mass-market production of his work. And that’s how Actress is presented here, as a delicately drawn page-turner of domestic desires stifled by both the hard knocks of stardom and delicate knicks of a broken glass.


The 10 Best Movie Posters of 2014

3. Lucy

Look closely at this seemingly basic poster for Lucy and you’ll locate its utter sophistication. In grayscale, except for the sun-tinted eyes and release date in the bottom right corner, the poster reveals Universal’s keen understanding of how to sell their product, stripping away any need for narrative explication and offering the barest essentials with an almost Warholian determination. Obscuring Scarlett Johansson’s face with the film title is seemingly a big gamble, but it underscores the mathematic code scribbled and barely discernible throughout as a barcode of ownership and identification. But it’s all in the eyes, a visual borrowed from Richie Hawtin’s ENTER parties in Ibiza, an even keener expression of the film’s spirit of kinetic, electronic-based socioeconomics and culture.


The 10 Best Movie Posters of 2014

2. We Are the Best!

The punk spirit is alive and well in this neon-infused poster for We Are the Best!, and it’s likely the poster on this list that most succinctly (and successfully) encapsulates the nature of the film it’s marketing. That is, there’s a youthful vibrancy to the potentially garish pink and yellow tones that dominate, but just as equally is the film’s humanist tenderness epitomized by Mira Grosin in profile, gently smiling at something in the distance. Moreover, the poster stays true to the source graphic novel and scribbles the film’s titular mantra with a glee that inscribes such enthusiasm on the importantly gendered bodies of an all-girl punk band.

Advertisement


The 10 Best Movie Posters of 2014

1. Gone Girl

Even though studios often feel more license to take risks in teaser posters because of their very nature, few dispense with any human faces altogether; even fewer neglect to give the film’s title. Yet that’s precisely what Fox does in this staggering poster for Gone Girl, with nary a discernible face or human presence to be found. Rather, the poster perversely alludes to Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi,” but the resonances here (unlike in the film) aren’t glib, since the Fox News scroll implies we’re watching a broadcast image. By overlaying a reference to pop music and populist fear mongering, the poster implies a satirical pulse that can operate sans human faces, where absence becomes presence through cultural institutions (music, literature, TV, film). The poster daringly contains all four, personifying the lowbrow material with a low-hanging cloud that makes the abbreviated deadline (or release date) all the more ominous.

Clayton Dillard

Clayton Dillard is a lecturer in cinema at San Francisco State University.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.