Which movie posters do you find most memorable? Which ones do you consider among the best?
Film critic TC Candler tries to answer those questions with his list of the 100 greatest movie posters of all time. He's included a lot of great, iconic posters, including those for Chinatown, Pulp Fiction and Casablanca. While reading Candler's justifications below each of his selections, I started to consider the criteria for what makes a poster great: beauty, evocation of a movie's themes, memorability and originality, among others. On on that basis, I think Candler made a glaring omission by not including the one-sheet for Raging Bull. The large, framed black-and-white rendering of Robert De Niro as Jake LaMotta is so beautifully visceral, arrestingly primordial. It manages to be faithful to the aesthetic of Martin Scorsese's film while also functioning as a stand-alone piece of art.
This article appears in Nov 26 – Dec 2, 2008.