When small movies have great posters

This probably isn't the sort of promotion one of my publicity contacts wanted when he emailed me about this movie, but maybe it's better than nothing.

To give you a little background, as part of my role as editor of ReelGood, I get lots of promotional emails from publicists about movies coming out -- many of them very small movies that are available for VOD rental or purchase only. Realistically, I don't have the space or bandwidth to review or otherwise write about these movies on our site, not when I'm already missing many of the big releases that will be of much more interest to our readers.

But during COVID it was a little different. The paucity of new theatrical releases, even when there were plenty of streaming releases, did prompt me to give some of these movies my attention. Unfortunately, most movies that can't find any distribution do, in fact, live down to our expectations given their budgetary restrictions. 

But just because you aren't going to be worth my time, realistically speaking, doesn't mean you can't have a damn great poster.

Like this one for The Death of April.

This poster is so great that I did glance at the creative talent involved to see if I could convince myself to watch it and review it. I decided I couldn't, especially not with all the prestige movies coming out during awards season, but hey, at least this post on my alternate means of interacting with the movie world gives them some additional visibility. 

The poster reminds me of the one I've always loved for the Sandra Bullock vehicle Premonition, which you can see here:

Maybe I'm just a sucker for tree branches. (An observation I just realized I already made in this post, ha ha.)

You might wonder why I don't just give the movie a watch and then later decide whether to invest the additional time to review it. Well for one, that 90 minutes is precious to me, especially this time of the year. But more importantly, you enter into a contract when you request a screener for a movie. It's not a legally enforceable contract, of course, but you're going to really disappoint the publicist if you don't review it, and maybe they won't send you additional emails. Probably depends on how desperate they are. It's probably something you can get away with once, or maybe twice, but you'd have some really annoyed correspondence to deal with. (And yeah, I don't really care if a publicist who only publicizes very small movies stops sending me emails, but there's an element of human decency involved with the whole thing as well.)

But who knows, maybe someone reading this will be intrigued enough by The Death of April to give it their attention if it crosses their path of immediate availability. 

After all, some movies with microscopic budgets are great. I just don't think a great poster is enough to convince me that this might be one of those exceptions.