by Kurt Halfyard

Friday One Sheet: SHAZAM! (And the Deadpool Effect)

It has been a slow month for movie posters. And I rarely highlight superhero stuff, because I am no expert at the nuance/history of the characters and they are ubiquitious, and generally they are lazy. And yet, here we are...
by Kurt Halfyard

Friday One Sheet: THE EMPEROR OF PARIS

The art of the character poster is alive and well in France at the moment. Jean-François Richet's glossy blockbuster on the worlds first Private Detective, François Vidocq is no exception. Vincent Cassel is playing the criminal turned criminologist, who enraptured...
by Kurt Halfyard

Friday One Sheet: RECHAZADOS (Rejected)

This is our second week in 'God's Eye' overhead views. Here is the key art for Argentinian 'Future Medieval' post-apocalyptic narcotics drama Rechazados, aka Rejected. On one hand, teenagers bathing nearly naked in a natural lake reminds me of Nic...
by Kurt Halfyard

Review: WIDOWS, a Rip-roaring Robbery Is Just the Icing on the Cake

Steve McQueen's whip-pan transition from Oscar-winning 12 Years A Slave to a star-studded commercial remake of a British TV-mini series, Widows, is crafted with such care and visual sophistication that even Viola Davis' character, Veronica, dropping off her poodle at the...
by Kurt Halfyard

Review: In CAM, Horror Unfolds in Open View of the World

In the twentieth century, it used to be decades (more often never) for our technological fears, and their refracted social mores, to manifest themselves into some kind of actuality. Now it seems the cycle-time of what we can conceive of,...
by Kurt Halfyard

Friday One Sheet: God's Eye View in ARCTIC

Maximizing negative space is a tried and true strategy to communicate "Survival Movie" with your key art. Big kudos to design studio B O N D for going all the way with the full God's Eye snowy wasteland view for...
by Kurt Halfyard

Friday One Sheet: BOY ERASED

Various groups in the LGBTQ community have designed some excellent posters in partnership with Focus Features and Joel Edgerton's earnest/activist (and middle-brow) Conversion Therapy expose Boy Erased. I am partial to this minimalist one, from The National Centre of Lesbian...
by Kurt Halfyard

Friday One Sheet: Floating Heads, The Horror, The Horror

It is the week of Halloween, and horror movie posters abound. But the real horror is the poster-trend that never seems to die: the infamous floating heads. This trend came to prominence in the age of Walmart DVD shelves. Getting...
by Kurt Halfyard

Friday One Sheet: THE FOG

It's Halloween season, and while the masses are all set to flock to David Gordon Green's 're-write the canon' sequel/remake/whatever in their local multiplexes, Rialto Pictures is quietly re-releasing a 4K remaster of the feature film John Carpenter made right...
by Kurt Halfyard

Friday One Sheet: SUSPIRIA In Design

Back to the exceptional key art campaign for Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria remake. For me, this 3 colour 'design 101' minimal poster, and its colour shuffled variant, evoke the iconic poster for Andrej Zulawski's Possession. I mean, not obviously, of course,...
by Kurt Halfyard

Friday One Sheet: SPOOR

Today we have a stark, and 'uncanny valley' type of key art out of Turkey. Agnieszka Holland's much lauded Polish crime film, Pokot (Trophy), took a fair number of awards and plaudits on the festival circuit including Berlin's Silver Bear,...
by Kurt Halfyard

Friday One Sheet: Tied Up For THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT

Lars Von Trier's serial killer miniseries, The House That Jack Built, that got condensed into a feature has a monochrome-palette set of character posters that recall the advertising campaign for Von Trier's last large opus, Nymphomaniac. Indeed, design studio The...
by Kurt Halfyard

Friday One Sheet: A SIMPLE (Thai) FAVOR (Again)

A number of weeks ago, we slathered on the love for the pastel geometric key art designs for Paul Feig's mystery thriller, A Simple Favour. As the film gets an international push, there has been consistency in the marketing campaign,...
by Kurt Halfyard

Toronto 2018 Review: IN FABRIC Is More Thriftshop Than Selfridges

Any new Peter Strickland film is cause for celebration. The Berkshire auteur has delivered some of the most delightful unease (and wicked humour) in cult cinema since 2009's Katalin Varga. In Fabric is his most wildly fluctuating film, where the highs...
by Kurt Halfyard

Toronto 2018 Review: NON-FICTION, A Comedy That Is Both Social And Media

"More people read my blog than my books," decries one of the characters in Olivier Assayas's latest film, Non-Fiction. The response from another is, that those blog readers are more likely than anyone else to buy those books. And a...
by Kurt Halfyard

Toronto 2018 Review: WIDOWS, Intelligent and Slick Commercial Cinema

Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez and Elizabeth Debicki star in Steve McQueen's top-quality heist movie.
by Kurt Halfyard

Toronto 2018 Review: AMERICAN DHARMA Wrestles With Our Current Political Carnage

The third chapter in Errol Morris's documentary interview trilogy on significant figures in USA policy creation and thinking is described by the director himself as "his horror movie." Indeed, the Oscar-winning documentarian showcased a very considerate and quite repentant Secretary...
by Kurt Halfyard

Friday One Sheet: SUSPIRIA And Watercolour Nightmares

Our poster column is more or less on hold while the Toronto International Film Festival takes over the city for the next ten days, but I wanted to quickly highlight Tony Stella's watercolour terror of a poster for the remake...
by Kurt Halfyard

Friday One Sheet: CINEMATOGRAPHE LUMIERE, The World's First Movie Poster

Looking more 'theatrical playbill' than 'key art,' this One Sheet, for the Lumière Brothers' travelling collection of short films, is a beautiful, even understated, representation of its time. Released in December 1895, to advertise a bold new entartinment technology, and...
by James Marsh

Festival Diary: Arrow Video FrightFest Day 1 - THE RANGER, SUMMER OF 84

The 19th edition of the UK’s foremost celebration of ghoulish genre cinema kicked off in riotous style last night at the glorious Empire Cinema in London’s Leicester Square. The five-day horrorthon kicked off with the UK premiere of Jenn Wexler’s...