Posterized September 2026: Barbara Forever, Hope, The History of Concrete & More

The fall-festival season is upon us with Telluride, Venice, TIFF, and NYFF all gearing up for their latest installments. So be on the lookout since some of those same titles might also pop up at your local multiplex in short order (see TIFF premiere Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother getting a limited release on September 25 before expanding in October). You never know how fast or slow that film you’ve been following will become available. Charlie Harper (September 25) has waited a full year since its own TIFF debut to finally hit our marquees.

It’s also a month to kickstart spooky season, whether with action thrills via Onslaught (September 4), zombie horror via Resident Evil (September 18), or family-friendly scientific experimentation via Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom (September 18). There’s always a little something for everyone.

Hopefully a few of the below titles will spark your interest too thanks to their respective posters pulling your attention away from all that big-name Hollywood studio fare.

Hand-drawn

One of those festival films that needed a year before bowing in front of general audiences is the mouthful that is You Had to Be There and its lengthy subtitle (limited, September 18; expanding, September 25). A documentary about 1972’s legendary Toronto rendition of “Godspell” demands some “peace and love” vibes via a wonderfully illustrated collage of cast members Martin Short, Eugene Levy, Gilda Radner, Victor Garner, and others.

The colorful poster even has a frame of white circles to mimic a theater’s lit poster displays, transporting us back in time as though we’re standing outside the Royal Alexandria Theatre waiting for the doors to open. The Grateful Dead-esque title font pairs nicely with the hand-scrawled subtitle alternating between lowercase and all-caps words on a very shaky horizontal trajectory. It embodies the DIY underdog attitude that comes with taking the world by surprise.

MTCO’s one-sheet for The Incomer (limited, September 25) swaps out that cartoon style for Krishna Bala Shenoi’s realistic digital painting to supply its own collage of characters. Rather than a barrage of faces framed within a heart, this trio are positioned as though posing for a portrait upon an island of rock resting in front of a mountainous landscape. With them are life-size totems with folk horror portent, a head popping out of the water, and a seagull cawing.

Rather than keep everything to scale for full verisimilitude, however, the artwork takes liberties in the foreground by positioning two unknown figures dressed as birds. It’s a nice tease for the eccentricities to come without distracting our attention from its purpose. They would be the first thing we looked at if not for this shift in size. Now, along with those other pieces forming a “U” frame around the main actors, we can find our focal point and branch out accordingly.

While both of those posters embrace the philosophy of filling every inch of the page with a person or object to envelop their viewers in the scene, Dylan Haley takes a less-is-more approach with his artwork for On a String (limited, September 11).

I love the minimalist approach of placing a masked-out Isabel Hagen onto a blank page to then draw a foundation around her. All it takes are four lines that double as a tacked-up frame and a delicate tightrope for her to walk. Tie the ends to the stacked title with knots and you’re even able to play with the whole’s impossible physics by adding a slight bow to the line beneath her feet. She’s literally been put on a string.

It’s a great use of space and color: the top and bottom are balanced between the heavy laurels and credit block, respectively. That leaves Hagen and the title to fill the middle slant of a hidden “Z” by creating a descending 45-degree angle from top right to bottom left when moving from her head to the orange words.

With character

Sometimes you can’t go wrong with a captivating portrait and uniquely stylish typeface. Case in point: If I Go Will They Miss Me (limited, September 11). It takes a considerable amount of confidence and skill to hash out a composition this simple and heartfelt at the same time.

The way the actors look back at us. The delicate embrace of Danielle Brooks’ chin resting on J. Alphonse Nicholson’s shoulder. The blurred cross on the wall. The hand-drawn airplane above the title. The perfectly tucked critic quote in white that’s offset by the light of the window beside it. The meticulously kerned title broken onto three lines via an elegantly vintage all-caps serif. It’s a powerfully emotive glimpse at characters inviting us into their home.

Callan Advertising’s Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty! (limited, September 25) delivers a similarly effective marriage between image and text in a completely different way. This time the two elements are separated into a diptych wherein Rinko Kikuchi’s comical look of shock is stacked above a bright-red rectangle housing a very fun and bold all-caps sans serif with confetti-curled punctuation cutting into the letters.

The energy is sky-high as the blue text and eye shadow flicker with the red field and lipstick. Every element seems as though it’s ready to jump off the page with an excitement that cannot be contained. We don’t learn anything about the plot beyond that yearning for movement. And we can’t wait to shake our booty beside her.

Sister Hyde Design’s Drusilla Adeline goes ominous with her poster for Black Zombie (limited, September 11). It’s a fantastic rendition of the main film still that accompanied the title on its festival tour—one that shows a Black man holding a torch in search of an escape. By stripping the scene of its photographic detail to create a backlit silhouette, the documentary’s merging of folk lore, history, and horror is cemented via its faceless void.

It’s hard not to get drawn in once you add the gorgeous title treatment’s sleekly thin characters possessed with an arts-and-crafts vibe and the choice to go duotone for a grungy, photocopy aesthetic that leans into the notion of appropriation and evolution. The sheet epitomizes the distillation of a film’s ethos into a single intuitive image that proves a work of art itself.

Rising and falling

It’s tough to leaf through the posters for Hope (September 9) since so many seem unfazed by their potential to supply spoilers. I don’t even want to mention what that potential is in case I fall victim to the same issue, so I’ll focus solely on the great teaser created by Park Si-young.

Devoid of any glimpse at the plot, this one-sheet seeks to evoke atmosphere instead—namely action. This is a scene in motion. Between the radial blur on the trees in the background and freeze-frame of violence in the foreground (whether the man riding the horse is attacking the man floating beside it or saving him with a quick lift of the collar), our eyes shoot through the page from left to right in a blink.

The fading title letters help the effect, both through their fleeting appearance and ability to bleed into the background courtesy of the choice to move the actors above them via the positioning of the “P”. Is the word a decree for survival or an empty promise?

The film strip on the Barbara Forever (limited, September 4) poster appears stuck in a limbo like that man beside the horse. Unless it’s merely a static shot illuminated on a light table. I like the idea that it could be either—that uncertainty speaks to fluidity of the moving image itself. What better way to personify the career of a director than utilizing the tools of her craft? Adrian Curry did the same for Riefenstahl too.

Both campaigns look to place their subject into the realm of that subject’s art while providing insight into the person. That hand being held up in front of the latter’s face speaks to the German’s controversial nature as Hitler’s propagandist. The former, shown hugging her camera in bed with a rainbow spilling out the lens, speaks to her being a pioneer of lesbian cinema.

It’s the best of both worlds: a portrait of the human and embodiment of the spirit. That it’s also just a cool image with the purple “Eastman” and burned-out numbers by the perforations shouldn’t be made inconsequential, though. Because we need that aesthetic allure to spark our attention. Catch the eye first. Feed the mind second.

One might say Mark McGillivray wields a similar conceit with his design for The History of Concrete (limited, September 18). It’s an absurd topic that demands an absurd image. Why not just place a red-ribboned concrete cinder block on a field of off-white so it floats in stasis between the text?

You must laugh at the juxtaposition. The playful yet professional typography that alternates between an all-caps serif and a script font to give formal credence to what might be the most banal object you can conjure. There’s an art-gallery feel that seeks to trick us into forgetting these bricks can be found on the side of the road. It doesn’t get more Dada than that.

Except, of course, that the entire page becomes a field of that same concrete. That’s the real beauty of the block’s presence: not to giggle at its odd presentation, but to discover that it is what makes us notice this isn’t simply black text on a white surface. It’s concrete on concrete. How ingenious is that?