This is one of those posters that you can’t quite believe the studio was willing to go ahead and print, but you’re very glad they did! The poster was designed and illustrated by the brilliant cartoonist Chris Ware, the man behind the sublime Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth graphic novel and other excellent creations such as Quimby the Mouse (one of his earliest charatcters).

In an article on the Vulture website, the artist says of the poster; “I wanted to get at both the transcendent solemnity of the film while keeping some sense of its loose, very unpretentious accessibility.” He also remarks,”This being a poster, however — and even worse, me not really being a designer — I realized it also had to be somewhat punchy and strange, so as to draw viewers in and pique their curiosity without, hopefully, insulting their intelligence.”

The intricate lettering, oblique imagery and brilliant use of colour is quintessential of Ware’s work and it’s a thrill to see it on such a big scale. I’ve read some complaints that it’s almost too difficult to read, but I think that’s part of its charm and it is infinitely more interesting than most of the bland photoshopped creations so prevalent today.

The film itself, as the title suggests, focuses on the reminiscences of Uncle Boonmee, a dying man who spends his final days recalling his previous lives with the ghost of his dead wife and his long lost son who has returned as a kind of ape creature with red eyes (as depicted on this poster). Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the film is based on a book that was written after a man named Boonmee approached Phra Sripariyattiweti, the abbot of a Buddhist temple in the director’s home town, claiming he could clearly remember his own previous lives while meditating. The abbot was so impressed with Boonmee’s ability that he published a book called A Man Who Can Recall His Past Lives in 1983.

Winning the Palme d’Or at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, it’s certainly not a film for everyone with slow meditative sequences and bizarre, often hallucinatory imagery, but it’s definitely worth a watch, particularly for fans of world cinema.

The original trailer is on YouTube.

2012 was an important year for several of cinema’s biggest franchises with the latest James Bond film, Skyfall, appearing four years after the last, plus Christopher Nolan bringing his Dark Knight trilogy to a spectacular close with The Dark Knight Rises. However, unquestionably the cinematic event of the year was the much anticipated release of Marvel’s superhero team-up The Avengers.

Even before the successful release of Iron Man in 2008, the production team in charge of what is known as the Marvel Cinematic Universe, had planned to release a series of films focusing on individual superheroes based on Marvel comic characters, with the intention of establishing their backstories, and popularity, with fans before uniting them together in a ‘crossover’ film. The original Avengers comic, which brought together previously stand-alone characters including Thor, Captain America, Hulk and Iron Man, was first released in 1963 and has been in print since then so it was no surprise that it was chosen to the be the crossover film following the first five standalone stories.

The film was helmed by cult screenwriter/director Joss Whedon who saw worldwide success with TV shows like Buffy, Angel and cult favourite Firefly, but this was his first major studio film and his appointment in 2010 was seen as a surprise, but welcome, choice by many fans. Whedon pushed the studio allow him to begin a new script after reading a screenplay by Zak Penn that they had been tinkering with since 2007 and the studio eventually agreed, with production beginning in July 2010.

Marvel’s faith in Whedon paid off in spectacular style when the film was released in 2012 and broke multiple worldwide box-office records, including highest-grossing opening in the US, the highest opening week earnings and fewest number of days to reach half a billion dollars (23). It was the highest grossing film of 2012 and currently stands at third in the all-time rankings.

To celebrate the release of the film, Marvel once again worked with Austin-based Mondo to release a series of screen prints based on characters from the film. The incomparable Austin-based geek culture outfit has worked on prints for all of the standalone Marvel releases, starting with Iron Man in 2008 and only skipping the same year’s The Incredible Hulk.

The team at Mondo assembled a roster of its most celebrated artists to turn in designs for each of the main characters and these were released over the period of a week in April 2012, beginning with Olly Moss‘ portrait of Black Widow and ending with Thor by Martin Ansin and Iron Man by Kevin Tong. A few weeks later, on the eve of the film’s release, Mondo then revealed a print featuring all of the characters that was designed and illustrated by arguably their most popular artist, Tyler Stout.

As usual, the print came in both regular and variant versions and, despite each having relatively high print runs, the poster sold out within seconds of going on sale on Mondo’s webshop. I was lucky to snag a copy of the print via Tyler’s ‘lottery’, which he now holds on his own site shortly after each print release sells out via Mondo.

Whilst adding the regular version to the Film on Paper collection I wanted to interview the man himself about the creation of the poster as I’ve done previously with his work on the prints for Akira, Kill Bill and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. The interview can be read in full by clicking here.

Note that the final image of Iron Man is stamped on the back of the print.

A striking portrait of the underrated actor Chris Cooper features on this Japanese B2 for the release of the 2007 drama Breach. Based on a real incident, Cooper plays Robert Hanssen, a senior FBI agent who was discovered to have been an undercover spy for the Soviet Union and later Russia for over twenty years. Ryan Phillippe plays a somewhat fictionalised version of Eric O’Neill, another FBI employee who was tasked with going undercover as Hanssen’s clerk under the pretense of trying to bring to light certain ‘sexual deviances’.

Initially frosty, the older agent grows to like O’Neill and the pair become closer as the film progresses, despite the misgivings of O’Neill’s wife Erica (Caroline Dhavernas) who resents Hanssen’s intrusions into their life, including encouraging the pair to attend church with his family. Eventually O’Neill tells his handler (played by Laura Linney) that he can find no evidence of odd sexual activity, but then he is told of the real reason he has been tasked with getting close to Hanssen and agrees to help catch him passing secrets to the Russians. The tension escalates as Hanssen suspects that the net is closing in on him and O’Neill reassures his boss that nothing is wrong as he helps to orchestrate his downfall.

Cooper is probably best known for his role as the domineering, military neighbour of Kevin Spacey’s character in Sam Mendes’ American Beauty, but he has been acting for almost 30 years and is one of those classic ‘that guy’ character actors. He received critical acclaim for his portrayal of Hanssen and the film itself was well received upon its release.

After eight films and close to 150 posters (according to the IMPAwards), this poster for the first film in the Harry Potter franchise is the only one I’m happy to add to my collection, and features art by the incomparable Drew Struzan. Perhaps the most frustrating thing is that it was originally intended to be the first in a series of Struzan designs; Drew was told he’d be doing a poster for each of the subsequent films. This design is featured in his must-buy book ‘The Art of Drew Struzan’ and he talks about the plans:

Hearkening back to Back to the Future and Indiana Jones, they wanted a consistent technique and style they could perpetuate through a series of posters. I watched the movie on a monitor, got the stills – it was everywhere. I’d never read the books, but fans felt the movie poster captured the spirit, the mystery and sense of adventure.

We were going to be treated to a new Struzan poster for every film release, but this was not to be and the studio changed its plans:

Warner Bros. got a new head of worldwide advertising. And whenever you get a new guy, he wants to flush everything approved by the prior regime.

A hugely disappointing move since Drew was (and is) the perfect artist to capture the magic and fantasy of the Harry Potter films, yet the studio felt photographic images were the only way to sell the films to the public. Drew was as disappointed as the rest of us:

I had been preparing to live with Harry Potter for six movies; I was really getting into it. At the point they killed me, I couldn’t let it go and went ahead and painted the finished version of the sequel for my own satisfaction. I had to complete it.

The Art of Drew Struzan features his design for the second film and it’s another superb poster, as expected. We can only imagine what the rest of the posters would have looked like, if only the studio had stuck with their plans…

British film website The Shiznit has collected all of the posters together and rightly awarded best poster of the series to this one.

Artwork by the brilliant Robert McGinnis on this US one sheet for the 1980 re-release of Woody Allen‘s 1973 sci-fi comedy Sleeper. Allen stars as Miles Monroe, a musician and health store owner who is cryogenically frozen by accident in 1973 and then revived 200 years later to discover that 22nd-century America is now an oppressive police state ruled by a dictator. Monroe falls in with a group of rebels who are trying to infiltrate the government’s top secret Aires Project, and it’s not long before he is on the run from the authorities with a kidnapped socialite Luna Schlosser (Diane Keaton) in tow.

One of the director’s earliest and best, in my opinion, the film is a frequently hilarious slapstick adventure that differs greatly from many of his later, more serious and introspective films. Incredibly, Allen was able to complete editing almost 35 hours of footage down to the release running time of two hours; a feat he managed with two days to spare. The film was released with the title ‘Woody and the Robots’ in French-speaking Canada and this led the director to ensure he had a clause in all future contracts that prevented his film titles being changed by third parties.

Robert McGinnis is an American artist and illustrator who is perhaps best known for his work on several James Bond posters, as well the iconic one sheet for the first release of Breakfast at Tiffanys. These and many others can be seen on this website. The other posters I’ve collected by him can be seen here.

The brilliantly bonkers trailer can be seen on YouTube.