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Above: Czech poster for Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, Italy, 1968).As I’m sure I’ve said before, the world of Czech movie posters is never less than an embarrassment of riches. I keep discovering new artists that I was never aware of previously, all with an impressive body of work behind them. The other day, as I was looking through the new acquisitions of my favorite poster shop, Posteritati, I came across this striking poster for Once Upon a Time in the West: a fascinating combination of bold color, eccentric collage, pop art elements and unusual typography. I wasn’t aware of the name of Stanislav Vajce before that but a quick search on the store's website and elsewhere revealed a wild array of some of the most exciting and inventive Czech posters I have seen in a while. As with so many of...

Above: Italian 4-foglio for Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1960); artist: Sandro Symeoni.

The two most popular posters—each with over 600 likes—that I have posted in the past three months on Movie Poster of the Day have been unfamiliar takes on very familiar movies. The stunning Italian 55" x 78" poster for Godard’s Breathless, sold by Posteritati this past fall, is strikingly different from the usual poster images of Belmondo and Seberg strolling the Champs-Elysée or smoking in bed. Instead, artist Sandro Symeoni adapts the climactic scene of the film, but gives it a much more noirish feel, with Belmondo’s petty criminal receding into the blackest of nights. Without looking at the names you’d be hard pressed to identify the film from the poster.

The Russian poster for Star Wars, below, created in 1990 for the first Russian release of the film, is even less easily identifiable: a colorful crayon-drawing...