45 Years poster design

My mini poster for Andrew Haigh's fantastic 45 Years. 
Since seeing it, not a day has passed that I haven't found myself thinking about it.

Lost in Translation poster design

My poster for Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation.

You might have heard of it.

Despite a bunch of attempts at other designs, I felt nothing worked as effortlessly as a simple crop of this gorgeous shot from the movie.

The Counselor poster

My poster design for the much-maligned, but utterly unique The Counselor.

Man, some people hated this movie so much, but I was transfixed the whole time (I’ve only seen the Director’s Cut).

There’s little exposition, loads (and loads) of offbeat dialogue and terrible things are always happening – mostly on the edges of these characters lives and mostly offscreen.

The harsh world the movie depicts makes people dismiss it as nihilistic or pointless. But I think The Counselor does have a point – it’s just too horrible for most of us to contemplate.

Macbeth poster

Death. Curses.

My poster design for Justin Kurzel's sensational film of Shakespeare's Macbeth.

The Hateful Eight poster design

My mini poster design for Tarantino's The Hateful Eight.

Bone Tomahawk

The film with perhaps the best dialogue of the year, and one of my favourite all-round movies I saw this year was Bone Tomahawk.

With a great cast, all performing at their best (in fact it took ages for me to realise which actors I was even watching in the cases of Richard Jenkins and Matthew Fox), there was unlikely a better ensemble cast this year.

I've seen read that some people find the pace too slow for what they'd heard was a western/horror mashup, but I would have gladly spent another hour with these characters as they talked their way through the barren countryside. I loved these guys.

When the horror does arrive though, it doesn't take the easy road. There are some truly shocking moments which won't soon be forgotten. 

I made up a simple little poster for the film, after ripping images from the great character posters released for the movie.

Can't wait for S. Craig Zahler's next feature. This was a gem.

Watching the Rocky saga for the first time

I only just saw the entire Rocky series for the first time this Christmas period, as a 35 year old.

Opening title of Rocky, 1976

This was a series that I ignorantly thought I didn't need to see to understand. I thought I would know each and every beat that it delivered, before it delivered it. I thought I would grow bored. I didn't think I'd be invested in the story of Rocky Balboa.

But I was  wrong.

I tremendously enjoyed every film in the series - some because they are legitimately great, and others because of how unashamedly silly and of their time they were (I'm only really looking at you, Rocky IV, and the studio-imposed score to Rocky V).

In a way I'm glad I waited this long. My movie-watching education has been too thorough for there to be many gaps as big as the Rocky series, so I had a very rare opportunity to enjoy an entire classic movie saga that despite its reputation, I actually knew very little about.

And then I got to cap it all off with the recent release of Creed, Ryan Coogler's excellent Rocky sequel/spin-off that showed there are still great stories to be told in Rocky's world. 

The entire series struck me in ways I didn't expect, and I grew to love the Rocky character in ways I woudn't have thought possible.

I apologise to anyone whose love of Rocky I dismissed in the past. You were right and I was wrong, all along. Let's get together and talk Rocky sometime, huh?


postscript:
Following my completion of the saga I created this poster for its latest chapter, honouring its very first.