{"id":4820,"date":"2026-04-24T15:58:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-24T19:58:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/versionindustries.com\/blog\/?p=4820"},"modified":"2026-04-27T16:34:37","modified_gmt":"2026-04-27T20:34:37","slug":"mubi-movie-poster-of-the-week-top-10","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/versionindustries.com\/blog\/2026\/04\/24\/mubi-movie-poster-of-the-week-top-10\/","title":{"rendered":"MUBI, movie poster of the week + caspar’s top 10 posters"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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our poster for rob rice’s feature feature film, ponderosa<\/a>, was selected as MUBI’s movie poster of the week<\/a> today. to accompany the selection caspar was asked by adrian curry<\/a> to pick his top 10 favourite movie posters (and 10 runners-up) and comment on them. you can read three excerpts from the piece here:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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ADRIAN CURRY:\u00a0<\/strong>Ever since I\u00a0interviewed designer Caspar Newbolt<\/a>\u00a0about his poster for\u00a0The Act of Coming Out<\/em>\u00a0(Alexandra Stergiou, 2022) and he spoke so eloquently about the art of making posters, I\u2019ve 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\u00a0Ponderosa<\/em>\u00a0(2026), this seemed the perfect time. Premiering at the upcoming Tribeca Film Festival on June 6, and billed as an experimental comic horror movie,\u00a0Ponderosa\u00a0is directed by Rob Rice and concerns a young man named Zeke who, \u201cwhen 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.\u201d Newbolt designed the poster for Rice\u2019s first feature,\u00a0Way Out Ahead of Us<\/em>\u00a0(2022) and his design for\u00a0Ponderosa\u00a0is as oblique, intriguing, and flat out beautiful as all of his best work.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

CASPAR:<\/strong> Like a lot of us doing this, I stumbled and fell backwards into making film posters. In 2011 I was working mostly as a website designer, bumming around New York trying to make sites for rock bands and real estate brokers. In the spring of that year a friend asked me to lecture a room of filmmakers in Manhattan about making websites for films. The talk was hosted by Jon Reiss, who I found out soon after had directed the seminal Nine Inch Nails music videos for \u201cHappiness In Slavery\u201d and \u201cGave Up,\u201d and who would later invite me to work with J. J. Abrams on an alternative reality game in Los Angeles. Jon and I remain friends, and meeting him alone would have been enough to change my life. However in the shadows of that dark lecture hall also sat\u2014amongst others\u2014Tim Sutton, a filmmaker with whom I\u2019ve now made posters and titles for seven feature films.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Creatively speaking, I always say \u201cyes\u201d to doing something I\u2019ve 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<\/em> (2012) and I said, \u201cOf course!\u201d This wouldn\u2019t be the first time Tim saw in me something that I did not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/em> like other film posters. A great poster should be a piece of artwork that you want on the wall because it\u2014like the film it was based upon\u2014has 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\u2019s permission. Thus, as the Polish poster-maker Leszek \u017bebrowski suggested when he said to me, \u201cI like making posters because it means I don\u2019t have to get into art galleries any more\u2014the streets are my art gallery now,\u201d it rests upon the shoulders of any poster-maker to make sure our streets are as beautiful as we can make them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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3. 1975 Polish poster by Mieczys\u0142aw Wasilewski for Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid<\/em>(Sam Peckinpah, USA, 1973).<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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I have a theory about Vasilis Marmatakis\u2019s excellent poster for Yorgos Lanthimos\u2019s The Lobster<\/em> (2015)<\/a> and I guess now is the time to publish that theory, given that this Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid<\/em> poster so substantiates it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The theory is this: The Lobster<\/em> poster isn\u2019t just a great poster for the film The Lobster<\/em>, it\u2019s a great poster for every film. It\u2019s, in fact, a universal film poster. Simply put, you could scratch out the title The Lobster<\/em> from the poster and write almost any other film name there instead, and the poster would work beautifully. Often filmmakers I\u2019m working with send me the film posters they like or that they hope might inspire our work together. The Lobster<\/em> poster is regularly included. This is a fact that further supports this theory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The poster above by Mieczys\u0142aw 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\u2019s 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\u2026 Honestly, you name it\u2026<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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Saul Bass was by his own admission someone who tirelessly searched for such universal devices, and to powerful effect. They\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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8. US one-sheet by Saul Bass for Exodus<\/em> (Otto Preminger, USA, 1960).<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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A thing I think about a lot in my practice\u2014thanks in a large part to my years working on Filmmaker Magazine<\/em>\u2014is how to make print work that looks like it\u2019s physically moving, or has just moved, without<\/em> using ugly motion blurs or similar effects. Given the inherently static and flat nature of print design this might seem like a fool\u2019s errand. However I\u2019ve come to learn that it is possible and that Saul Bass\u2019s poster for Exodus<\/em> offers one such solution (see also: Hans Hillmann\u2019s poster for Muriel<\/em>, which I\u2019ll get to later).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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In the case of Exodus<\/em>, 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\u2019ve created an obvious sense of something moving, or something that has just<\/em> moved. Thus it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

you can read the rest of the piece here<\/a>. a huge thank you again to adrian curry<\/a> and to everyone at MUBI for the continued support.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 three excerpts from the piece here: ADRIAN CURRY:\u00a0Ever […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,9,5],"tags":[877,1065,622,318,17,1233,104,1238,513,1237,1239,1228,1232,880,72,1229,564,1226,121,1075,1227,1230,1049,1231,846,1234,1235,955,1236,954],"class_list":["post-4820","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog-v","category-grafiks-v","category-news-v","tag-adrian-curry","tag-alexandra-stergiou","tag-caspar-newbolt","tag-cinema","tag-design","tag-exodus","tag-film","tag-gave-up","tag-happiness-in-slavery","tag-j-j-abrams","tag-jon-reiss","tag-mieczyslaw-wasilewski","tag-mieczyslaw-wasilewski-2","tag-mubi","tag-nine-inch-nails","tag-pat-garrett-and-billy-the-kid","tag-pavilion","tag-ponderosa","tag-poster","tag-postermaking","tag-rob-rice","tag-sam-peckipah","tag-saul-bass","tag-the-lobster","tag-tim-sutton","tag-top-10","tag-tribeca-film-festival","tag-vasilis-marmatakis","tag-way-out-ahead-of-us","tag-yorgos-lanthimos"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/versionindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4820","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/versionindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/versionindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/versionindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/versionindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4820"}],"version-history":[{"count":30,"href":"https:\/\/versionindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4820\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4858,"href":"https:\/\/versionindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4820\/revisions\/4858"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/versionindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/versionindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/versionindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}