The Globe and Mail

THE BEST

The Tree of Life

Freelance designer Mark Carroll’s poster for Terrence Malick’s long-awaited film, showing 70 original, images from the film, intrigued his followers while quietly embodying the film’s combination of cosmological mystery and family drama, with photos of the actors amidst whirling galaxies, oceans, deserts and above the title, a baby’s foot in an adult’s hand.

Shame

If you’re sick of posters that are little more than headshots of stars, this minimalist poster for Shame offers a welcome contrast. The poster features nothing but rumpled bedsheets with the film’s SHAME stamped in capital letters in white in the centre, like a brand. Whatever just happened, you want to know about it.

Hobo with a Shotgun

This hand-drawn poster for Canadian director Jason Eisener’s seventies-style exploitation flick looks like some nicotine-stained souvenir you’d peel off the plaster of a decrepit old movie house. British artist Tom Hodge has created the central figure of Rutger Hauer with his gun exploding, surrounded by a mass of flames, storm troopers, chaos and a whole lot of vintage personality.

The Dark Knight Rises

This second black-and-white poster for the 2012 Batman film is both chillingly sinister and graphically eye-catching. Who is that hulking figure walking away under the title “The Legend Ends”? A moment later, your eye moves down to the shape on the ground, Batman’s broken mask. Uh oh.

The Skin I Live In

Artist Juan Gatti has been a longtime collaborator of Pedro Almodovar, known for his Saul Bass-inspired graphics. To illustrate Almodovar’s latest perverse and baroque film, he took images from antique anatomy books – a figure without skin – and botany texts, to create this creepy beautiful illustration, resembling the title page of a Victorian book.

THE RUNNERS UP

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Designer Neil Kellerhouse’s black-and-white image shows Daniel Craig looking back over his shoulder while walking into the silhouette of Rooney Mara’s spectral Lisbeth Salander, with her Mohawk hair-do forming an arc against the white background. The hair-raising is mutual. The kicker is the tagline: “What is hidden in snow comes forth in the thaw.”

Meek’s Cutoff

The illustration of Michelle Williams wielding a shotgun might recall Annie Oakley, though the blunt sans serif white type and the character’s cold-eyed stare hints that Kelly Reichardt’s feminist western isn’t quite conventional western fare. Activist designer Marlene McCarty was formerly part of the Gran Fury collective (they produced the AIDS poster “Silence=Death”) and is known for disturbing drawings of matricidal teenaged girls and chimps interacting with humans.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2

It’s apocalyptic showdown time. A begrimed Harry goes nose to – well, where Voldemort’s nose should be, with the elder wand between them severing the backdrop, which is strewn with flying blood and sparks. There’s nothing cute or childlike about it. As Harry grew up, so did the series.

Midnight In Paris

A tacky-funny poster plays on the American-in-Europe archetype, with a casually-dressed Owen Wilson strolling by the Seine with van Gogh’s The Starry Night swirling above Paris, instead of the little town in the original van Gogh painting. Nevermind that The Starry Night has been in New York for the past 70 years. Since this is a dream landscape, why quibble?

Winnie the Pooh

The illustration style of Disney’s Winnie the Pooh harks back to E.H. Shepard’s original illustrations of A.A. Milne’s books, leading to this unexpectedly visually witty poster, showing the Pooh characters floating in a pot atop a lake of yellow honey. The crowning touches are Pooh’s oven-mitt hat and an untethered red balloon.

THE WORST

Bucky Larsen: Born to be a Star

This comedy is about a guy who moves to Hollywood to follow in his parents’ footsteps and become a porn star. So it’s got comedian Nick Swardson in a blond bowl wig and sweater vest, with his pants around his ankles. Don’t you get it? It’s got to be funny because he has his pants down.

Twilight: Breaking Dawn – Part 1

A massive-headed Edward, Bella and Jacob look like awkwardly arranged wax works, turned at uncomfortable angles to make eye contact with the camera. Stranger still, wolves seem to be running across a lake of fire in the background in an image so tacky it appears inspired by the Three Wolf Moon T-shirt.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Apparently this comes from a cutting-room floor scene in the movie where Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander are hitchhiking through northern Sweden and he says, “Hey, maybe it would help if you expose your breasts …” Exploitative, clumsy and out-of-character with anything in the film, the dubiously controversial poster sent exactly the wrong message to fans.

Martha Marcy May Marlene

In Sean Durkin’s absorbing drama, a young woman (Elizabeth Olsen) runs away from a cult to join her sister and brother-in-law, but she may have been driven mad from her experience. You too can go mad from the experience of waving your smartphone in front of the enigmatic movie poster trying to figure out the point.

X-Men: First Class

This was an enjoyable movie, but the posters were a disaster. Apparently the art department wanted silhouettes and the marketing guys said, “No, we need stars’ faces” so a compromise was reached: Badly-cropped heads floating somewhere in the stomach and crotch regions of the silhouettes.