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our poster for rob rice’s feature feature film, ponderosa, was selected as MUBI’s movie poster of the week today. to accompany the selection caspar was asked by adrian curry to pick his top 10 favourite movie posters (and 10 runners-up) and comment on them. you can read four excerpts from the piece here:

ADRIAN CURRY: Ever since I interviewed designer Caspar Newbolt about his poster for The Act of Coming Out (Alexandra Stergiou, 2022) and he spoke so eloquently about the art of making posters, I’ve been wanting to ask him about his favorite movie posters and the designers who inspired him. With the opportunity to spotlight his newest poster, for the indie film Ponderosa (2026), this seemed the perfect time. Premiering at the upcoming Tribeca Film Festival on June 6, and billed as an experimental comic horror movie, Ponderosa is directed by Rob Rice and concerns a young man named Zeke who, “when the buffet where his mom works closes down, is forced to entertain the wild advances of a rich regular who is weirdly and vehemently obsessed with becoming his father.” Newbolt designed the poster for Rice’s first feature, Way Out Ahead of Us (2022) and his design for Ponderosa is as oblique, intriguing, and flat out beautiful as all of his best work. 

You can see where Newbolt is coming from, and what he values most in graphic design, by looking at his favorite posters and reading what he thinks about them.

CASPAR: Creatively speaking, I always say “yes” to doing something I’ve never done before and then go home in a panic and quickly figure out how to do that thing. I never went to art school or design school, so this is a good way for me to catch up on some of the schooling I never had. Tim asked me if I could make a poster and titles for his debut feature Pavilion (2012) and I said, “Of course!” This wouldn’t be the first time Tim saw in me something that I did not.

I try very hard to not look at film posters when I work and to do everything in my power to draw from other sources for ideas. I do this because I believe that a really good film poster should be more than just promotional artwork for a film, and in so doing it should not think like other film posters. A great poster should be a piece of artwork that you want on the wall because it—like the film it was based upon—has the poetic capacity to speak to you about your own life. After all, film posters, like all visual marketing pieces, get put up around town without anyone’s permission. Thus, as the Polish poster-maker Leszek Żebrowski suggested when he said to me, “I like making posters because it means I don’t have to get into art galleries any more—the streets are my art gallery now,” it rests upon the shoulders of any poster-maker to make sure our streets are as beautiful as we can make them.

To that end, the following 20 film posters are the exceptions to my own rule. These are the posters that, despite my searching for ideas elsewhere, continue to hugely influence my practice. Each of them has haunted me in different ways for years as I continue to try to make something beautiful and thought-provoking for those of us on the street, going about our daily grinds.

3. 1975 Polish poster by Mieczysław Wasilewski for Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid(Sam Peckinpah, USA, 1973).

I have a theory about Vasilis Marmatakis’s excellent poster for Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster (2015) and I guess now is the time to publish that theory, given that this Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid poster so substantiates it.

The theory is this: The Lobster poster isn’t just a great poster for the film The Lobster, it’s a great poster for every film. It’s, in fact, a universal film poster. Simply put, you could scratch out the title The Lobster from the poster and write almost any other film name there instead, and the poster would work beautifully. Often filmmakers I’m working with send me the film posters they like or that they hope might inspire our work together. The Lobster poster is regularly included. This is a fact that further supports this theory.

The poster above by Mieczysław Wasilewski proves itself time and again to also be one of these universal film posters. Simply adjust the cut-out figures to that of your film’s protagonists and you could have a poster for a film about someone retreating inside themselves, a poster for a film about someone coming of age, a poster for a film about someone going back in time, a poster for a film about succession, a poster for a film about unrequited love, a poster for a film about swapping bodies with someone else… Honestly, you name it…

Saul Bass was by his own admission someone who tirelessly searched for such universal devices, and to powerful effect. They’re certainly not the be-all and end-all in this kind of work, but if you stumble upon a new one you could have a piece of work that speaks to people more deeply than you originally intended.

8. US one-sheet by Saul Bass for Exodus (Otto Preminger, USA, 1960).

A thing I think about a lot in my practice—thanks in a large part to my years working on Filmmaker Magazine—is how to make print work that looks like it’s physically moving, or has just moved, without using ugly motion blurs or similar effects. Given the inherently static and flat nature of print design this might seem like a fool’s errand. However I’ve come to learn that it is possible and that Saul Bass’s poster for Exodus offers one such solution (see also: Hans Hillmann’s poster for Muriel, which I’ll get to later).

In the case of Exodus, the paper is burning away to reveal the credit block beneath, and you understand from the shape of the blue paper at the top, where the paper would have originally sat, unburnt at the bottom. So whether you use fire or a paper tear or fold that paper up, you’ve created an obvious sense of something moving, or something that has just moved. Thus it’s the combination of what was there before and what was revealed, all the while based on an invisible sense of a grid, that can give a design this kinetic quality. Saul does this here with panache, of course.

you can read the rest of the piece here. a huge thank you again to adrian curry and to everyone at MUBI for the continued support.

MUBI and seek and speak have kindly included our in hell with ivo and the act of dreaming posters in their end of year lists. MUBI placed kristina nikolova’s in hell with ivo poster in their best poster of the year 2025 runners up category and postermaker brandon schaefer included john maggio and neha shastry‘s the act of dreaming poster in his notable film posters of 2025 list.

a huge thank you again to adrian curry and bradon schaefer for the continued support of our work.

our poster for kristina nikolova’s music documentary, in hell with ivo, was selected as MUBI’s movie poster of the day today. a massive thank you once again to adrian curry for his continued interest in and support of our work.

the film stage and MUBI have kindly included our family portrait and april posters in their best movie posters of 2024 lists. whilst MUBI placed dea kulumbegashvili’s april poster in their 2024 runners up, the film stage went as far as to consider our poster for lucy kerr’s family portrait their 7th best poster of the year.

here’s what jared mobarek at the film stage had to say about the family portrait poster:

Much like the film’s commentary on absence versus presence, Caspar Newbolt’s poster for Family Portrait hinges upon the dynamic shared by those two states. Whether the hunt for a mother to take the Christmas card photo she enlisted them to take or pointed words read by the daughter searching for her so she can fly back home (“Where did my mother go when she would leave her empty gaze fixed on me?”), there arrives a shift from opposition to coexistence––we still have presence through absence and can be absent despite our presence. Thus Newbolt cuts the eyes out of Joshua Johnson’s The Westwood Children and places them upon a textured wash of color that thematically erases the bodies while simultaneously promising they’ll exit the fog next. It’s an illusion. Just like the photo. Because a finished product was never the goal; the portrait was simply an excuse to physically reunite one more time… just in case next year proves too late.

a huge thank you again to jared, adrian curry and both of their institutions for the continued support of our work.

our poster for dea kulumbegashvili’s second feature film, april, was selected as MUBI’s movie poster of the day today. a massive thank you once again to adrian curry for his continued interest in and support of our work.

our posters for jane schoenbrun’s debut feature film we’re all going to the world’s fair and alexandra stergiou’s hybrid documentary the act of coming out have been selected by adrian curry to be amongst his 10 best movie posters of 2022. adrian wrote the following text for his mubi notebook column to justify his thinking in this regard:

“The posters in my list this year are those that do what any poster worth its salt should do: they stopped me in my tracks. These days those tracks are less and less likely to be along a city street or even inside the lobby of a multiplex and more likely to be on a virtual stroll (or scroll) through a streaming service or social media feed. The received wisdom is that this will result in a dumbing down of poster design, leading to work that is less complex and easier to take in in a one-inch high thumbnail. In other words, more big heads. But the 30 posters below, most of which I likely saw first on a phone screen, give the lie to that doomsday prediction. They are posters that not only work on first glance but reward repeated viewing. In other words, you could hang them on your wall. One footnote: there are a lot of pairs in this year’s collection, partly because I couldn’t fit all my favorites into a top ten, partly because I love graphic coincidences, and partly because two of a kind is sometimes better than one.”

“Another designer I have interviewed recently is Caspar Newbolt of Version Industries who, as I said back in July, has for the past ten years been stealthily creating some of the most adventurous, expressive, and unusual film posters out there. It was this beautiful and unique poster for the short film The Act of Coming Out that prompted me to contact him, but his deceptively lo-fi design for the online horror movie We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is also one of the year’s very best, especially in its motion version in which the design comes eerily to life.”

you can read the rest of the article here. a huge thank you again to adrian curry and to everyone at MUBI for the continued support.

our poster for alexandra stergiou’s hybrid documentary, the act of coming out, was selected as MUBI’s movie poster of the week today. to accompany the selection caspar was interviewed by adrian curry about the making of the poster. you can read an excerpt from the interview here:

NOTEBOOK: As with A Confucian Confusion, your poster feels as if you should be able to step back from it and a face will start to appear, but only a very vague sense of a face forms. Is there an actual face in there or is it a multitude of faces mashed together?

NEWBOLT: There is an actual face there but much like standing very close to a large painting by Seurat, when you are close to the poster you end up seeing only a cloud of colors and thus having the vaguest sense of a face or a multitude of faces as a result. That said if you squint your eyes, even close up, you’ll see the face much more clearly.

It will perhaps remind people of that famous scene in John Hughes’s Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) where they visit Chicago’s Art Institute and Cameron Frye ends up transfixed in front of Seurat’s painting, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1886). The picture was painted exactly 100 years before the Hughes film came out, and this particular scene in the film hit me very hard when I first saw it.

I am the son of two painters and grew up in museums and art galleries around the world. I knew every word of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off by heart by the time I was 14, inspired largely I’m sure by this moment Cameron has with the Seurat. I myself had stared in just such a way at just so many paintings as a kid. I love that in the director’s commentary for the film John Hughes describes Seurat’s pointillistic painting style as being like filmmaking, in that: “You’re very very close to it. You don’t have any idea what you’ve made until you step back from it.” (You can see the scene and hear Hughes’ commentary here.)

It was important to Alexandra and I that, because of the film’s narrative, you could not clearly tell the gender or ethnicity of the person in the poster. The film presents a series of queer and trans actors of various ethnicities exploring what Alexandra describes as “the never ending process of coming out,” and if you look at the LGBTQ flag you can better appreciate the color field we created for the poster. We strove therefore to create an image of a person with a visage comprised of these many shifting colors.

you can read the rest of the interview here. a huge thank you again to adrian curry and to everyone at MUBI for the continued support.

our poster for jane schoenbrun’s debut feature film, we’re all going to the world’s fair, was selected as MUBI’s movie poster of the day today. a huge thank you to adrian curry for his continued interest in and support of our work.

MUBI and slate have put together a list of their best film posters of 2014. we’re honoured to say that our poster for memphis came in 7th place, and must again thank adrian curry who put the list together for the recognition. it goes without saying that such an accolade would have been impossible without the belief and support of tim sutton and the rest of the film’s crew. it’s not often that a relationship of this kind allows such a level of artistic freedom, and furthermore that this is one particular collaboration that’s only just getting started.

cheers.

our poster for tim sutton’s memphis was kindly selected as movie poster of the day by adrian curry on his blog of the same name. adrian writes for film comment, MUBI and is the design director for zeitgeist films. we’re thrilled to have made the cut. thank you, adrian.