These posts celebrate the movie trailers, movie posters, commercials, print ads, and other promotional material that stand as their own works of art.

By the middle of the twenty-tens, I had mostly stopped paying attention to movie posters. This was a significant change for me. When I first became a proper moviegoer, in the nineteen-eighties and nineteen-nineties, every trip to the theater involved eager scanning of the walls to see which promotional one sheets had been added to the frames up and down the hallways. I loved sussing out which forthcoming features were hinted as having a little more weight to them on the basis of the way they were presented, by how much care the marketing department had put into the poster. Some twenty years later, the constant buffeting of advance scuttlebutt had removed most of that mystery, and many movie posters were made with a wan plainness that suggested everyone involved understand that this large rectangle of paper was now of the of the least likely enticements to curious cineastes.

I think the above disenchantment helps explain why I was so mesmerized by the poster for Moonlight, director Barry Jenkins’s 2016 masterpiece. Here was a movie poster as art again. And it also conveyed in a strikingly constructed image that the film was simultaneously a unified story and a narrative triptych. Like the movie it touts, the poster is a powerhouse.

These posts celebrate the movie trailers, movie posters, commercials, print ads, and other promotional material that stand as their own works of art.