This Week In Posters: ‘Jigsaw,’ ‘Kingsman 2,’ And Cravats!

This week in This Week in Posters we begin with adorable lil’ Tom Cruise, looking so suave in his unbuttoned doll clothes in this poster for American Made. Get it? Those are lines of cocaine back there! That doesn’t really come through at first, kinda just looks like a Black Flag poster. My favorite part is the lady back there. I don’t know who she is, or what she’s doing, but it’s important to know that she’s there and she loves Tiny Tom very much. GRR, HETERO STUFF!

This poster for Anabolic Life is ugly as hell (orange?) but I’m intrigued, so I suppose mission accomplished. What was he doing before the steroids though? Coding? Going to Widespread Panic shows? What does he need the steroids for? Anyway, I hope it’s just like that one Ben Affleck after school special where he chugs the whole pill bottle and starts punching through walls. Man, steroids are awesome.

You really have to hand it to Blood Stripe for trying to pull off a floating head, silhouette, and fluttering flag all in the same poster. Maybe the flag was overkill? I mean, it’s already called “blood stripe.” Which sounds sort of like a gum brand.

GRR, FREEDOM ISN’T SPANGLING!

Dear God, Tyler Perry is making a second Madea Halloween movie?? As if there weren’t enough holidays for her to threaten with a rolling pin, now he’s doubling up? By the way, his current rate of production, and this is neither joke nor exaggeration, is two Madea movies per year. The man is a cash machine. Is Tyler Perry technically the world’s most successful drag queen? Discuss.

“40 years ago, J.J. Abrams fell in love with lens flare.”

This is a really weird poster for Good Time, which I quite liked. Good Time is an intense, gritty crime movie, and this poster looks like… an oil painting? R-Pattz looks cuddly, but in the movie he plays statutory-raping sociopath. It’s striking, but also strikingly different than the movie it’s advertising. Also, where are his right fingers?

Everyone in this has extremely British hair. Like you really didn’t need to have Big Ben in there, we already did the side part math.

*Pearl Jam voice* Huuuuman floooo-owww…. thoughts arrive like butter flieeeeeees…. ohhh he don’t knowwww-owwww….. so he chases them awayyyeeeeaayyy-heyyyy…

Anyway, cool poster. I’m expecting refugee Koyaanisqatsi.

Cool Jigsaw poster. The soft focus really takes the attention off the fact that it’s a movie about a crazy clown. Hey, is Jigsaw a person or a doll? I still don’t know.

What is that logo? Is this a Mazda ad?

Charlize Theron and Javier Bardem are literally smoldering. Are the army guys shooting at their monumental visages? Also, Sean Penn is directing. I guess the question there is whether the same Sean Penn who directed The Pledge and Into the Wild was also the Sean Penn who became a thesaurus-drunk Hunter Thompson wannabe who farted on El Chapo, or if he had been going slowly insane since those movies. If it’s the latter, this could be… uh… interesting.

This looks like an ad for cravats. That guy in the background is all “Good lord, look at the cravat on Nighy.”

Also, “Before The Ripper, Fear Had Another Name.”

Do they mean “The Limehouse Golem” is the other name? I don’t know if that counts as a name. That feels like more like a description. If it had another name, it would be like Dave the Golem, or Limehouse Tony.

On the one hand, this title communicates exactly what the story is about in a few words. On the other, I’m not sure putting the title in the voice of an obnoxious bystander is the most intriguing option. Like, is the whole thing going to be told in grating woo-girl speak? Also, “her wedding, his funeral” sounds like one of t-shirts you get at a stand next to a Bubba Gump.

Does this Logan Lucky poster mean I forever have to change my stance on tilt-shifty, diagonal horizon line posters? This one’s actually cool. Dang, am I actually a total fraud? I hate it when this happens.

Why do I feel like every foreign horror movie involves a sexy girl walking around a city at night frowning and secretly (sexily) hoping for death?

From Wikipedia:

“In the Catholic Church and Eastern Orthodox Church, the novitiate, also called the novitiate, is the period of training and preparation that a novice (or prospective) monastic, apostolic, or member of a religious institute undergoes prior to taking vows in order to discern whether he or she is called to vowed religious life.”

Thanks for making me look that up, jerks! I guess that would be a long thing to explain in a poster. I don’t really have a solution here.

Is that an angry yoga mouse? And it’s the nut job because he’s… like… planning a nut heist? Because mice love nuts? I feel like I’m too far behind on kids movies and now nothing makes sense.

I’ve seen a thousand different versions of the “nerve bundles as visual metaphor” poster, but rarely as good as this. Maybe it’s because Peter Dinklage’s brow furrows make it look like he’s thinking super hard.

Josh Hartnett (Josh Hartnett’s disembodied Photoshopped head?) seems really bummed about the title of this movie. “Aw, bro!” he thought to the heavens.

Also, “never lose hope?” The tagline should obviously be “Never lose Hart.”

Aw, hell yeah. Snow is the most cinematic place to do a murder.

The hardest part about making a Michael F. Assbender snow man is deciding where to put the carrot.

What I’m getting from this is that people in Suburbicon get murdered. I don’t know about the blood stain on the sign, that seems like it would be a tell. “I need to make someone disappear.”

“Hmm, have you considered killing them in front of a giant billboard?”

I truly hope they mean “thirst” as in horniness, because this poster is an accurate reflection of being scared by your own horniness.

Here we have yet another example of the “debris flying everywhere = lots of action” school of postering. As well as the “producer gets his name above the title even though no one knows who he is” school of postering. Or maybe that’s more of a school of producering. Yeah probably the second one.

A lot of morose pistol men trudging through bleak landscapes this week, aren’t there? I hope he shoots the sh*t out of that abandoned roller coaster.

Is this about AA? This looks like it’s about AA. What’s the most compassionate way to say “hardest possible pass?”

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