50 Beautiful Movie Posters

Categorized | Technology Topics, Web Design

Posted on 12 October 2008 by Vitaly Friedman & Sven Lennartz

By Alessandro Cattaneo and Smashing Editorial Team

Movie posters are art and, unfortunately, the forgotten one. In the early years of cinema history, they were used just like advertising material. Displayed in theatres only, movie posters had the same function as a menu in a restaurant: what feast can I enjoy this evening? Nowadays, movie posters play a big role in cinema memorabilia collection. They have lost the “informative” tone to wear a more artistic and decorative dress. We want to change it with this post.

Made in many different sizes and versions, and released in different moments all along a movie’s life, posters immortalize in one static image the feeling and the atmosphere of a motion picture. Some posters can be dark or try to frighten the audience, others bedazzling with bright colors; some can be someway informative, while others can be fully teasing and may provide you only the date when movie will be released, even if you may not know what the movie is about.

In this post we present you a showcase of 50 beautiful movie posters. We went trought different decades of movie history and different genre, different graphical approach, colors and style. Movies the posters are about may be famous or not, this is not the point.

Movie posters put together the love for for two different visual arts: cinema and graphics. Enjoy!

Movie Posters

Star Wars (1977)

Walk the line (2005)

Grindhouse (2007)

The Spirit (Upcoming, December 2008)

Vacancy (2007)

Moulin Rouge (2001)

V For Vendetta (2006)

La Feria De Cepillin (2008)

The Thing (1982)

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street (2007)

A Clockwork Orange (1971)

28 Weeks Later (2007)

The U.S. vs. John Lennon (2006)

Planet of the apes (2001)

The Memory Thief (2007)

The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

Death Proof (2007)

The Good German (2006)

Perfume (2007)

The Shining (2008)

W (2008)

American Beauty (1999)

The Bank Job (2007)

Man With One Red Shoe (1985)

The Dark Crystal (1982)

Excalibur (1981)

Unforgiven (1992)

The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)

Zodiac (2007)

Dr. Strangelove (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb) (1964)

Good The Bad And The Ugly (1966)
Italian version.

Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

Rocky (1976)

Last Click

Beyond A Reasonable Doubt (1956)
Please note the advice’s style (highlighted with the red circle) for the audience: an innocent suggestion or just marketing?.