2025 is in full swing and a majority of America is probably looking for a means of escape from the literal and figurative flames engulfing their nation. A new entry in the “Zachary Levi only gets kids movies now” canon that’s from the producer of Wonder but not “A Wonder Story” like White Bird (The Unbreakable Boy opens February 21) and the latest installment in England’s beloved marmalade saga (Paddington in Peru opens February 14) should provide families that reprieve.
Something tells me Marvel’s bid to join the fight with Captain America: Brave New World (opens February 14) might not fit the bill for a vocal minority of our citizenry. Heck, I’m surprised an executive order hasn’t come down preventing it from opening. That’s where it seems we’re headed.
Add a return of some Oscar nominees to cash-in on the exposure and it’s not going to be easy sledding for everything else. Studios will need to plaster the walls and Internet with their posters to secure real estate in the minds of potential ticket buyers. We’ll see if some of the below are up for the task.
Do I know you?
One way to worm into an unsuspecting viewer’s mind is to give them something they might recognize. An echo towards nostalgia or motif or cliché. Let them know what they’re getting. Trick them into thinking they know before pulling the rug. Or maybe complete the assignment as given to make it “look” exactly like that other thing your client loved.
Cleaner (limited, February 21) is pure convention: give us an action image to show our lead means business and our director is going to go all-out on set-pieces. A little bit of Empire Design’s Mechanic: Resurrection, a touch of Ignition and LA’s Abduction, but with a flavor of its own by way of even crazier theatrics.
Here’s the thing: it’s a compelling image. The motion of Daisy Ridley falling at high speed. The shattered glass signifying her leap from a skyscraper window. The helicopter in the distance foreshadowing a continued chase while also balancing the weight of the composition sandwiched between title and cast names. It’s a fun freeze-frame glamour shot that leans onto its artificiality while also setting a scene.
Ex-Husbands (limited, February 19) is less about mimicking something (say, Callan Advertising’s French Exit) than it is solving a problem in a well-worn way. Because you have your photo of your three leads ready to go only to realize it must remain landscape to keep them all in-frame. The only way to leave it that way on a vertical page is to deal with all the empty space you’ll have left.
The simple solution is, of course, to bump up the contrast so the car roof turns pitch-black. Expand that color upward to fill the frame and your purposefully cropped photograph becomes a glimpse into the film’s world. I would have preferred the text to be smaller so that it could breathe more and not act like a visual vice crushing the actors beneath it, but maybe that’s intentional too. None of these men look particularly happy; perhaps that weight above their heads embodies the existential dread ravaging their souls.
As for The Monkey (February 21), the above version is a blatantly intentional homage of Hardcore. I haven’t seen this Stephen King adaptation yet, so I can’t speak to why this decision was made, but I won’t deny the effective nature of evoking another era.
This is especially true when Neon has recently leaned into the marketing strategy of intentionally submitting materials they know will be censored and / or denied simply to use such censorship and denials as the campaign. It’s an old ploy wielding the mantra that “all press is good press” while also whetting genre lovers’ appetites with the presumption that the finished result will be bloodier and more violent than anything you’ve ever seen before (go give that apolitical Damien Leone a run for his money).
Is it too niche for general audiences? You bet. That’s why we also get GrandSon’s tease with the monkey’s face and giant Saul Bass-like typography providing a more modern spin. It’s why we get the in-your-face, I’m-going-to-spell-everything-out-to-you version with a horribly fake image of a bloody knife to counter the novel of text beside it. Neon is covering all their bases.
My big question: when did Osgood Perkins start making “trips” à la Spike Lee “joints”?
Window to the soul
Quite the visual, a monster wearing a full leather face mask with bright glowing hearts where its eye holes should reside. How can you not be intrigued? How can you not want to discover if the result is a serious slasher or comedic parody? I wouldn’t even be surprised to learn they eventually pop out, enlarging and contracting in quick succession, like a Looney Tunes cartoon.
There really wasn’t another direction to go for BLT Communications, LLC when constructing their tease for Heart Eyes (February 7). That mug is the draw. Let it take center stage by confusing and exciting all who walk by in equal measure. Shroud the rest in shadow; add more hearts to the title treatment and “coming soon” text. Ensure that we’ll only know what this movie truly is by buying a ticket.
If you really want to peer inside someone’s soul, however, you must do so with Akiko Stehrenberger’s Armand (limited, February 7; wide, February 14). Those eyes are looking right at us––neither scared by all the hands grabbed at her face nor inviting them. There’s an almost defeated sense of fatigue. Of having been wrung-out with no real path back after accusations, blame, and guilt have been hung around her neck. This is a woman everyone wants a piece of right before they all decide to throw her away.
The scene in the movie that it comes from is an unforgettable one, and probably the most divisive, considering the nature of interpretative dance. It’s no surprise that the best two posters (Midnight Marauder’s version proves an inverse layout to the above Ex-Husbands, except with a much better handle on the negative space) have mined it as a way to portray the work. The latter is more emotional in its depiction of Renate Reinsve’s scream, but those feelings of being used and abused as an object (due to the collective psychology surrounding celebrity) remains intact.
Circling
You could say the two figures surrounding Celeste Dalla Porta on P+A’s poster for Parthenope (limited, February 7) are circling her, but the reality of this siren story is probably more about her drawing them in. We glimpse this truth through an image which seems almost religious in construction. They’ve come to visit her, to worship her. It’s as though she’s holding court and they lack the power to escape.
Beyond the captivating scene is also just a beautifully composed page. It’s a bit off-balance considering Porta must lean forward so her face rests at the center, but the other two actors are such afterthoughts to her gaze that they almost become as empty as the water behind her. They simply serve as a pathway from her eyes down to the title––itself a gorgeous font with curved flourishes in bright yellow to pop off the tan bodies and dark hair below.
There’s a painterly quality to the whole that is somewhat matched by Federico Mauro’s alternate sheet of an underwater city with Porta swimming above to really drive home the mermaid / mythical qualities of her presence. I really like the font here, too––its austere simplicity calls to mind chiseled text in marble.
Aleksander Walijewski’s Rounding (limited, February 14) possesses numerous circles––the most noticeable to my eye being the “O” in the title that practically pushes the other compressed letters away from it. You can then hopscotch your way down from there to Namir Smallwood’s eyes, shadowed cheek, candle-waxed neck, and stethoscope altar. Step by step we move down the center until finding footsteps in the snow below. Are they leading us out? Or are they all that’s left of someone lost to the flame?
It’s the artist’s style through and through. One sees this surrealist scene and painterly aesthetic and automatically assumes Walijewski is responsible. He tells a story with his imagery, distilling each film to its psychological essence. A doctor burning the wick at both ends who may also be shining a beacon for someone to find their way home? The mystery and magic draw you in, but the true meaning only becomes clear once you watch the movie yourself.
A similar thing is happening with Derek Gabryszak and Hannah Christ’s Universal Language (limited, February 14) in that the correlation between these four characters (yes, the turkey too) grows more transparent after you’ve seen the film. That doesn’t, however, mean you can’t get the sense that their connection is formed through place (the concrete overpass of a snowy path traveled upon) and destination (that specific spot they all stand on proving the perfect pot of gold to earn their attention).
Director Matthew Rankin takes us to this setting multiple times throughout the film, characters attempting to solicit the help of others while those others possess an ulterior motive. We can merely watch through the opening, the vantage too shallow to see anything but their figures in the snow. Only when the camera pushes in to look at what’s at their feet do we see what they see and, depending on what’s there, we’ll follow them as they leave to do it all again as this loop repeats.
That’s the beauty of the composition: each of its four quadrants are the same. It’s merely the time that’s changed. We thus click around 90 degrees to see what’s happening and discover which character is that moment’s lead. Then we click another 90, spying upon this utopian melting pot of a fantasy Canadian city where language, culture, and ethnicity co-exist in a way that’s as funny through its juxtapositions as it is natural in its overarching humanity.