Another year, another array of film posters to be found on bus stops, billboards, cinema foyer lightboxes and across innumerable, almost-identical social platforms.

Although there are still plenty of campaigns that throw everything at the wall – a stylistic shotgun approach with multiple posters in search of a vibe – this year has also seen some beautifully executed series that revolve around variations on a central idea; coalescing rather than conflicting.

Once again there’s a glorious variety of artistic approaches … but this year we now have sequins.

Challengers; Design: Gravillis Inc

As genre hybrids go, selling a love triangle sports movie is no easy thing, but Gravillis found a way to balance lasciviousness and lawn tennis in this gorgeous airbrushed art for Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers. So good, it was turned into an incredible dress by Celia Kritharioti, worn by Zendaya herself on the opening weekend. One day all posters will be presented this way.

Longlegs; Design: Grandson

The Longlegs campaign walked a fine line of establishing a mood while maintaining mystique with a procession of compelling and horrifying images stripped of any context or explanation. What’s happened here? Who were these people? Where are those people? What the hell is this film? With so much left to our imagination, we became uncomfortably complicit in filling in those blanks.

Queer; Design: Bond

Guadagnino again, but a whole lot more immediate and raw than Challengers. Not dissimilar to the Longlegs campaign, this series of posters for the adaptation of William S Burroughs’ Queer again steers away from showing the star, splashing vibrant type over intriguingly cropped images. Given how spare it is with details, it’s telling how prominent the A24 logo is; the enviable draw of the production company’s reputation now as much a selling point as the star and director.

Alien: Romulus; Design: Concept Arts

Fede Alvarez’s latest instalment in the increasingly sprawling Alien franchise leans heavily on our familiarity with tropes of the series while giving us a step-by-step display of the creature’s reproductive lifecycle. This poster captures the pivotal moment of human violation in that sequence. There’s no pretense of mystery here – we know exactly what’s happening and there’s something truly horrific about the image’s fait accompli stillness.

La Chimera; Design: Tony Stella

It’s easy for an ensemble cast to turn into a Photoshopped pile of heads and names, but artist Tony Stella’s hand-painted portraiture and lettering elevates this poster for Alice Rohrwacher’s gang of Tuscan tomb raiders into something altogether more elegant.

Mu Zhong Wu Ren 2; Design: Xin Yi Lian

There’s a touch of Bill Gold fourth wall breaking in Miao Xie’s slash across the frame of this poster for Mu Zhong Wu Ren 2 (aka Eye for an Eye 2). Simple, visceral, bloody – as posters for blind swordsman movies go, this is perfect.

Nosferatu; Design: P+A

A good way to find the best posters of any given year is to simply check Willem Dafoe’s IMDb page – he’s a magnet for these things and looks right at home in P+A’s character series for Robert Eggers’ remake of Nosferatu. Figures lurking in the shadows with pinprick eyes; calligraphic type echoing David Palladini’s art for the 1979 Herzog remake; that little mention of Christmas weirdly at home amongst all this dark Victoriana; the whole thing is an exercise in exuding purest gothicity.

Kinds of Kindness; Design: Vasilis Marmatakis

Dafoe also gets his own sheet in a series of character posters for Kinds of Kindness. Hot on the heels of the success of Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos has once again turned to the inimitable Vasilis Marmatakis to create a series of posters quite unlike anything else out there – distorting the film’s cast into a kind of surreal tedium.

The End; Design: Grandson

Finally a use for the plastic wrap filter! Grandson’s novel approach to character posters for Joshua Oppenheimer’s The End captures the tone of the film just so. Typographically, this would make an interesting double bill with another super-wealthy Tilda Swinton in 2009’s I Am Love from – yes, him again – Luca Guadagnino.

Deadpool & Wolverine; Design: Ignition

The marketing of the Deadpool films has always been a bit scattershot, but the latest film had a great hook, getting lots of mileage out of the odd couple pairing of the eponymous heroes. This one poster in particular, cheekily echoing a rather more sombre hand-holding poster for 2017’s Logan, boils it right down to the essence of the relationship: Deadpool’s schtick finally coming up against Wolverine’s snikt.