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Above: detail from the Argentinian poster for Magnet of Doom. Artist unknown.Jean-Paul Belmondo, the great French movie star who died last week at the age of 88, had a marvelous face. He wasn’t a classic matinee idol like his friend and compatriot Alain Delon but with the combination of his soulful puppy-dog eyes, lopsided boxer’s nose, and luscious feminine lips he could play both hoodlums or heartthrobs (and in Breathless he played both at the same time). A classic tough guy best known outside France for art movies, he was initially synonymous with the angry alienation of the French New Wave and starred in films by Godard, Truffaut, Melville, Malle and Lelouch. But he could play comedy as well as action (he was renowned for doing his own stunts) and was for a while promoted as a French James Bond. By the ’70s and ’80s—when he was...

Above: German poster for Last Year At Marienbad (Alain Resnais, France, 1961), artist: Tostmann.

Over the past three months of Movie Poster of the Day, the two most popular posters by far were two beautiful (each in their own very distinct way) posters that I posted in memoriam of two dearly departed auteurs: Alan Resnais and Harold Ramis. And two other posters among the most popular (i.e. most liked or reblogged) were those posted in celebration of Philip Seymour Hoffman, including Chris Ware’s lovely 2007 design for The Savages, one of my favorite posters of last decade. So, if nothing else, Movie Poster of the Day has recorded the saddest losses of the year. (Not forgetting the adorable Swedish poster I posted for Shirley Temple which didn’t make the Top 20.)

I’m happy to see a number of new posters here: a very popular Dutch Wolf of Wall Street,...