So Many Films This Year — Which Poster Makes You Want a Closer Look?

If the first impression isn't good, how can it be alluring?

We usually start getting to know a film from a trailer or a poster.

A poster is a static art form, and it carries a film's content, mood, taste and style directly. At year's end, media outlets each pick the best posters of the year — the well-known film site indieWIRE, Rotten Tomatoes, The Playlist, Screen Crush, and the film-review site MUBI. (Click the links for the full lists.)

The films on these lists cover a lot of ground: comedy, biopic, thriller, documentary. There are awards-season favorites like Moonlight and La La Land, big commercial titles like Star Trek Beyond and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, and small films like Green Room and Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World.

Some of them may be unfamiliar to you. But their posters, in all their different artistic styles, might make you want to take a closer look.

QDaily has gathered up a few traits these posters share. See for yourself why they were named the year's best.

A Clever Way of Embedding the Plot

Moonlight

Director: Barry Jenkins

Cast: Trevante Rhodes / Janelle Monáe / Naomie Harris / André Holland / Mahershala Ali

The film follows one man through childhood, adolescence and young adulthood — growing up, falling in love, discovering his sexual orientation, and, after outside judgment and inner struggle, finding himself. It became this year's awards-season favorite, and its poster made nearly every outlet's best-of list too.

Screen Crush's verdict on the poster: "Moonlight owes at least some of its box office to this mesmerizing poster," because the poster stands for the film. Its main image is assembled from the faces of the three actors who play the protagonist as a child, a teenager and a young man, each in a different color — green, purple, blue — for his state of mind and his experience at each stage. MUBI's line: "This poster feels like it's staring into your soul."

The Handmaiden

Director: Park Chan-wook

Cast: Kim Min-hee / Kim Tae-ri / Ha Jung-woo / Cho Jin-woong

Adapted from the British writer Sarah Waters's novel Fingersmith, the film is set in 1930, under Japanese colonial rule in Korea. A noblewoman has inherited a vast fortune (Kim Min-hee); a con man posing as a count covets it (Ha Jung-woo); a maid is hired by the count to get close to her (Kim Tae-ri); and there is the woman's guardian (Cho Jin-woong). Money and love work their way through the four of them.

The main poster pushes the characters forward. The hand-drawn Korean one is more reticent, and distinctly East Asian — the work of Empire Design. Against a gold-leaf ground, the title lettering and five classic scenes are threaded through stands of cypress; the whole image is delicate and secretive, and it carries both the film's opulence and its scheming. The curious part: the Korean hand-drawn poster is not quite the same as the American one. It swaps out two R-rated scenes — the aunt's suicide and a sex scene — and adds cherry blossoms to the trees.

Christine

Director: Antonio Campos

Cast: Rebecca Hall / Michael C. Hall / Timothy Simons

The film tells the life of Christine Chubbuck, a television reporter in the 1970s. In 1974, a horrifying tragedy took place at WXLT, a TV station in Florida: during what was meant to be a segment about suicide, the host, Christine Chubbuck, who suffered from depression, chose to end her own young life on the air.

The poster comes from the Polish poster designer Brandon Schaefer. You may have heard of The Poster Boys, a duo made up of two poster designers, Brandon Schaefer and Sam Smith, who post good poster design online whenever the mood takes them and run a podcast of the same name on iTunes about the stories behind poster design. Screen Crush ranked this poster first for the year, saying it not only explains the film well but works as a summing-up of American pop culture. Click this link to see more of the designer's work.

A Strong Sensory Hit

The Birth of a Nation

Director: Nate Parker

Cast: Nate Parker / Armie Hammer / Penelope Ann Miller

The Birth of a Nation tells the story of Nat Turner, a Black preacher who in 1831 led enslaved people in Virginia in a movement to free African Americans — and lit one of the fuses of the Civil War.

The poster's composition forms the shape of the American flag; the red stands for bloody violence and stages the spectacle of the uprising. Fine poster. The film's reviews, less so.

Don't Breathe

Director: Fede Álvarez

Cast: Stephen Lang / Jane Levy / Dylan Minnette / Daniel Zovatto / Emma Bercovici

Don't Breathe was named Best Horror Movie at the 22nd Critics' Choice Awards. Three young people break into the home of a blind war veteran to rob him and find that he can not only handle himself, he is keeping a woman locked in his basement. One of the three is killed; the other two have to fight their way out. On the poster the background is all black and a woman covers her mouth — she has just seen something shocking and terrible — and the mood is of danger from every side.

Green Room

Director: Jeremy Saulnier

Cast: Anton Yelchin / Imogen Poots / Alia Shawkat

The film is set in a remote, thinly populated corner of the American Northwest, where a few young punk musicians stumble onto an act of horrific violence, get locked in a room cut off from the world, and have to fight the neo-Nazis who want them silenced.

The cult-film sensibility, the uneasy chaos and the visceral kick of violence are all there at a glance. What the critics liked even more: the poster pays homage to the cover of London Calling, by the famous punk band The Clash — except that the guitar Paul Simonon is swinging has become a long knife.

Cosmos

Director: Andrzej Żuławski

Cast: Sabine Azéma / Jean-François Balmer / Jonathan Genet

Adapted from the novel of the same name by the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz, the film follows two young men, Jonathan and John, who have fled their country and taken a room at an inn in a small Polish town, only to be pulled into the strange events going on around them.

The poster, by Maida's design, is not just a bold black-white-red contrast. It has a few small details that catch the eye — the hand-carved title lettering, a bird hanged from a tree — and they hint neatly at the plot.

Retro, and Still Inventive and New

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

Director: James Gunn

Cast: Chris Pratt / Zoe Saldana / Dave Bautista / Vin Diesel / Bradley Cooper

This looks less like a movie poster than a retro fashion shoot or an album cover. In the black-and-white image, all the familiar faces are back — Star-Lord, Gamora, Drax, Rocket Raccoon, Yondu and Nebula — and don't miss Groot the tree creature, tucked in at Star-Lord's feet.

De Palma

Directors: Noah Baumbach / Jake Paltrow

Cast: Brian De Palma

A documentary about "America's Hitchcock," the director Brian De Palma. The poster is by Steven Chorney, one of the classic movie-poster artists of the 1980s. In it, De Palma peers through venetian blinds at the best shot of his life — a scene that may stay with you longer than the film does.

Sing Street

Director: John Carney

Cast: Ferdia Walsh-Peelo / Lucy Boynton / Jack Reynor

A light, gentle art-house film. In 1980s Ireland, a 14-year-old boy named Conor is bullied at school and takes refuge in music. Then he falls for Raphina, a girl a year ahead of him, and finds to his delight that she loves music too.

The poster sits between a drawing and a film still, and holds both the retro feel of the 1980s and the look of first love.

A Poster Can Be a Piece of Still Art, Too

La La Land

Director: Damien Chazelle

Cast: Emma Stone / Ryan Gosling / Finn Wittrock / J.K. Simmons / Sonoya Mizuno

La La Land has already collected more prizes than it can carry, and its posters found favor too — The Playlist put them second and picked two versions. One is a retro poster built on the model of a vinyl sleeve, with Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone steeped in blue and looking thoroughly melancholy. The other is made of blue bars, the color of melancholy, arranged like piano keys; the silhouette of the couple embracing and kissing, and the city at night, dissolve into that blue.

The Neon Demon

Director: Nicolas Winding Refn

Cast: Elle Fanning / Abbey Lee / Bella Heathcote

The film follows Jesse, a beautiful young woman who arrives alone in Los Angeles to break into modeling. The poster is prettier than the film. It uses a hallucinatory purple for the glitter and disorder of the fashion world, with the lead sultry under the lights.

Buster's Mal Heart

Director: Sarah Adina Smith

Cast: Rami Malek / DJ Qualls / Kate Lyn Sheil

A mountain man spends the winter in an empty hotel. He keeps having the same dream, in which a man goes missing at sea — and then he works out that he is the man in the dream.

The poster calls up The Grand Budapest Hotel. The design is clean and sharp, but look closely and you find odd things in it: a clock with its numbers reversed, a face in reflection.

Look — These Posters Will Get a Smile Out of You Right Away

Tickled

Directors: David Farrier / Dylan Reeve

Cast: David Farrier / Dylan Reeve / David Starr / Hal Karp / David D'Amato

A documentary about gay life: a gay journalist tries to sign up for a competitive tickling contest and is told the sport is for straight men only. Stubbornness takes over, he starts digging, and he finds a startling truth behind the tickling empire. For a documentary, Tickled has the feel of a manhunt thriller.

The poster is simple, on point and hard to miss — a bit like last year's Ant-Man poster, which needed no explaining either.

Operation Avalanche

Director: Matt Johnson

Cast: Matt Johnson / Owen Williams / Josh Boles / Jared Raab / Andrew Appelle

Operation Avalanche follows four CIA agents who, under cover of making a documentary, set out to expose NASA's Apollo program (plenty of people believe Neil Armstrong never set foot on the moon) and push themselves, step by step, to the edge of real danger.

In the poster, a person is pinching the Earth with a pair of tweezers — a nod to the film's subject, the argument over whether the Apollo moon landing was staged.

Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World

Director: Werner Herzog

Cast: Kevin Mitnick / Lucianne Walkowicz

One of the "big four" of New German Cinema, Herzog uses his flat, German-accented English in this documentary to examine the online world we think we know so well. He interviews some of the best-known figures in internet and computer culture: Elon Musk, head of Tesla and SpaceX; Robert Kahn, the American computer scientist who invented the IP protocol; and Kevin Mitnick, the world's number-one hacker, once wanted by the FBI.

The poster poses the question Herzog wants to put to his audience: "If the internet disappeared one day, would fragile human civilization be destroyed along with it?"

Leaving Something Unsaid Is Alluring, Too

The Lobster

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

Cast: Colin Farrell / Rachel Weisz / John C. Reilly

It was already one of many outlets' best posters of 2015, and this year it turns up again on the indieWIRE and Rotten Tomatoes lists — film-review sites clearly remain deeply in love with this poster for The Lobster.

For a film about how being single turns you into an animal, the poster does plenty of damage to single people too. It is by Vasilis Marmatakis, who also designed the posters for the director's two previous films, Dogtooth and Alps. It makes visible what the film is after — "loneliness" and "being needed" — and perhaps what Colin Farrell is cradling is an invisible, oversized lobster. (In the film, he says that if he fails to find a partner he wants to become a lobster.)

Free Fire

Director: Ben Wheatley

Cast: Brie Larson / Cillian Murphy / Armie Hammer / Michael Smiley / Sharlto Copley

The story is set in Boston in 1978 and turns on an arms deal in a warehouse. The deal goes wrong, and things get worse from there.

The Playlist ranked this poster first. Hands come in from every direction, each holding a gun — reticent, and impossible not to look into. Who is shooting? Who is being shot at? What is between them? One poster lays out a tangled plot.

The poster for John Wick: Chapter 2 resembles Free Fire's a little, and Screen Crush put it on its own best list — though next to it, Free Fire's has more art in it.

Plainness Is a Powerful Form of Expression

Jackie

Director: Pablo Larraín

Cast: Natalie Portman / Peter Sarsgaard / Greta Gerwig

The film covers the four days before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, as they happened to the former first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy. The poster's all-red scheme is hard to look away from: the background merges with Natalie Portman's red outfit, which throws her expression and her hands into relief and hints at what is surging inside her.

Certain Women

Director: Kelly Reichardt

Cast: Kristen Stewart / Michelle Williams / Laura Dern / Jared Harris

Adapted from short stories by the well-known bestselling writer Maile Meloy, the film follows four women making their way in a bleak, hard small town in the American Northwest. The poster is drawn in pencil-sketch style, which carries the theme inside it: what we see is someone else's image, already worked over, and the truth may be something else.

10 Cloverfield Lane

Director: Dan Trachtenberg

Cast: John Goodman / Mary Elizabeth Winstead / John Gallagher Jr.

Adapted from The Cellar, a novel by John Campbell and Matt Stuecken, the film follows a young woman who loses consciousness in a car crash and wakes to find herself locked in a basement.

Only two months passed between the first announcement of the film and its release, with no promotion in between, which made it feel thoroughly mysterious. The poster is just as mysterious, and just as spare: a white line runs out of the "L" in the title and becomes a tunnel dug through the earth. There is a punchline buried in it — "Monsters come in many forms." So it's coming from underground?

High-Rise

Director: Ben Wheatley

Cast: Tom Hiddleston / Jeremy Irons / Sienna Miller

The film is about class warfare and violence among the residents of a high-rise apartment block cut off from the world. In the poster, the tiny figures reflected in a car and the warped shape of the tower hint at the plot, and they do it cleverly.

You are probably more familiar with its other poster, though: Tom Hiddleston's fine body.

Right. We won't be running that one here.

Cover image: the poster for La La Land