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. 

A sucker for faces made of branches

Ranking Return of the Jedi on Flickchart just now, I came across this amazing poster I'd never seen before.

It's apparently by a guy named Olly Moss (www.ollymoss.com), who has designed posters for Star Trek and Lost, among others. (He's also got an Empire poster with a Boba Fett silhouette, and a Star Wars poster with a C3PO silhouette, but they aren't as arresting as this is.)

It's a unique poster in terms of Jedi subject matter, to be sure. The lone imperial walker almost appears to be lost, in a portrait of Endor that looks like it has more in common with Dagobah. And then there's the fact that the whole thing appears inside a Darth Vader silhouette ... well, it's just enthralling. In fact, you can almost look at it like the imperial walker has its head craned upward in Vader's direction, seeking approval and/or guidance in the task at hand.

But I think it's really the branches making up Vader's eyes that I love.

I didn't realize it at first glance, but this poster got me excited in the way that a similar poster got me excited for a considerably lesser movie: Premonition.

If you've never seen the original Premonition poster, which trusted us enough not to emblazon Sandra Bullock's face across it, here's an example below:


I like this poster so much, I even remember where I was when I saw it for the first time. (Outside the Laguna Beach single-screen theater, which was flooded last year. I sure hope they can repair.)

Nothing more to say for today. Just keep those face-branches coming. I'll never get tired of them.