The Best Movie Posters of the Year

A great poster can make you want to see a film before you know anything about it. Before the trailer, before the reviews, before a single friend recommends it, there is often a single image on a theater wall or a streaming menu that makes you stop and wonder. This year delivered an unusually strong crop of (fictional) movie posters, with bold type, clever art and one perfect silhouette that our team has not stopped talking about. Our design writer spent the past month collecting every poster released this year, narrowing hundreds of options down to the handful that truly earned a place on our wall. Here are the best movie posters of the year, along with what makes each one work.

What makes a great movie poster

A movie poster has a hard job. It must tell you the genre, the mood and a hint of the story in a single glance, often from across a crowded lobby or as a small square on a phone screen. The best posters do this with remarkable economy. Before ranking this year’s favorites, we set a few simple criteria:

• Instant readability. Does the image work at thumbnail size as well as on a wall?
• A single strong idea. The best posters commit to one visual concept instead of crowding in every character.
• Honesty. Does the poster promise the movie you actually get?
• Curiosity. Does it make you want to know more?
• Craft. Typography, color and composition all need to work together.

Our favorite

The (fictional) poster for “Saltwater” shows a single ferry on a blank sea. That is it. No actors, no tagline across the top, no wall of review quotes. Just a small white boat in the lower third of the frame, surrounded by an enormous field of gray-blue water that fades into a foggy sky. The title appears in small, simple lettering near the bottom edge.

The poster works because it captures exactly what the film is about: two people alone in a vast, dangerous world, trying to make it across before the storm. The emptiness is the message. It also stands out dramatically in a lobby full of crowded, colorful posters. You notice it precisely because it refuses to shout.

The best posters ask a question the movie answers.

Our design writer

The “Saltwater” poster asks the simplest question of all: will they make it? The film spends ninety minutes answering it, and in some ways, it leaves the answer up to you.

The trend

Hand-drawn art is back after years of photo collages. For much of the past two decades, movie posters leaned heavily on photography, often arranging the faces of the cast in a floating stack or a dramatic lineup. This year, more films turned to illustrators and painters, and the results have been striking.

Designers we spoke with said the shift is partly a reaction against sameness. “When every poster is a collage of floating heads, nobody remembers any of them,” said Megan Sato, a (fictional) poster illustrator based in Los Angeles. “A painted poster has a personality. It tells you a human made this, and that a human made the movie, too.”

Standout illustrated posters

Several illustrated posters made our shortlist. The poster for “Paper Boats” uses soft watercolor to show a tiny folded boat drifting down a rain-soaked street, with a child’s reflection in the puddle. The poster for “Lemonade Stand” is a bright, retro-style painting of two sisters behind a hand-lettered sign, drawn in the style of a 1960s children’s book. And the poster for “Blue Hour,” fittingly, is a single moody painting of a lighthouse at dusk, with a tiny seabird circling the beam.

The rest of our top picks

Beyond our favorite and the illustrated trend, a handful of other posters stood out for very different reasons.

Orbit Nine

The big space drama of the year could easily have gone with a crowded poster full of astronauts and explosions. Instead, it shows a single astronaut’s helmet visor, with the reflection of Earth and a small child’s drawing taped inside. It hints at the film’s emotional core, a mother trying to get home to her daughter, without giving anything away.

Night Bus

This thriller’s poster is almost entirely black, with the glowing rectangle of a bus window in the center. Through the window, you can just make out a silhouette with a backpack. It is the perfect silhouette we mentioned at the top, and it creates instant unease. The tagline, set in small type below, reads simply: “Last stop.”

The Quiet Year

A wide photograph of a wheat field at dawn, with a single figure walking along the horizon. The type is tiny and placed far off center, which gives the image room to breathe. It is calm, sad and beautiful, just like the film.

Second Cousins

The one poster on our list that embraces chaos. It shows an overhead view of a lake house kitchen packed with relatives, each one doing something slightly ridiculous. Fans have enjoyed studying it for hidden jokes, which is exactly the spirit of the film.

A few that did not work

Not every poster this year was a success, and the misses are instructive. Several big releases returned to the familiar floating-heads approach, stacking the faces of their stars in a column against a stormy sky. They were technically polished, but our team could not tell them apart from a few feet away. Another common problem was the overloaded tagline. One action film’s poster carried three separate lines of text, a release date, a list of cast names and a quote from a critic, all fighting for attention over a busy photograph. When everything is important, nothing is.

We also noticed a handful of posters that promised a different movie from the one audiences got. A gentle family drama was marketed with a dark, thriller-style image, and viewers who expected suspense left disappointed. A poster can be clever and still be honest. The best ones manage both, and this year’s winners prove it is possible.

Key takeaway: This year’s best posters trusted one strong idea, used empty space with confidence and gave audiences a reason to be curious rather than a list of reasons to buy a ticket.

Why posters still matter

In an age of trailers, teasers and social media campaigns, you might expect the poster to be fading in importance. In some ways, the opposite is true. On streaming services, the poster image is often the first and only thing viewers see before deciding whether to press play. A strong thumbnail can be the difference between a hit and a film nobody notices.

Posters also live on long after a film’s release. They hang in bedrooms, dorm rooms and home theaters. Collectors seek out limited prints, and some illustrated posters are now sold as art in their own right. A great poster becomes part of how we remember a movie.

Vote for your favorite

We have added every poster mentioned here to our awards tracker, where you can vote for your favorite and see how your pick stacks up against other readers. Our design writer will reveal the reader’s choice winner at the end of the month, along with a few honorable mentions that just missed the cut. Until then, take a closer look the next time you walk through a theater lobby or scroll a streaming menu. The poster might be telling you more than you think.