I'm not an artist and have positively no sense of design, but Silence of the Lambs and Jaws seem to me to be downright outstanding, each for different reasons. (Many editions of Benchley's book use the same basic image  on the cover; not sure whether it was used on the book first or was created for the film.)

I always admired The Exorcist's original poster:

It seems like it just takes a still from the film, but it's one of the prettiest shots. In Friedkin's recent book, I believe I recall him saying that he blocked off a whole day (well, a whole night anyway) of shooting so they could get that shot; there's more to it than meets the eye, and he felt it was important.

It occurs to me that I actually don't know a lot about the approach to poster design. It seems like these days the ones that are really good are really good, and the ones that are clunkers almost make me think I could have done better. (The poster for a horrible recent film called One for the Money is simply Katie Heigl wearing tight jeans. It's not a movie poster. It's a poster for how taut her ass is. Wait, actually, I'm okay with that poster. Carry on.)

Seems like good posters tend to stick in the mind. I'm not sure how that effect gets achieved, actually, but I can tell you that I don't know what the poster looks like for some of my favorite movies ever, whereas I'll never forget ones from movies that were horrible-but-nonetheless-had-cool-posters. Also it's cool when a poster can be evocative before you've seen the film, and then take on a whole new resonance or meaning after you've seen the film. (Silence of the Lambs and Cabin in the Woods are like that.)

I can appreciate that example because Anime movies are one of my own blind spots. I find that the people who enjoy them seem to "get" something I'm not getting, as if they have a set of categories I don't have, probably because I'm just woefully uneducated about the artform.

Ah yes. The panelists are scattered all over the globe, yet able to converse with ease. I love you Internet, you magnificent bastard.

I guess in a post-Room 237 world there's slightly less reason to doubt that it's a real trailer. When I watched 237, I kept wondering if it was itself some kind of satire or lampooning of something or other; I kept waiting for that other shoe to drop. But, as people have said, the movie essentially just says "Yeah, so, you know... some people think these things. Kthnxbye."

Oh sure, there's absolutely a sense in which that's true. Like I say, that describes some of the best critics. It's a fine line, I guess, between loving movies and loving what it is that you, personally, love about movies.

I was being more sarcastic than clear. What I was driving at was, just as each person has different taste in movies, each person also has a different taste in movie criticism. We all value, respect, and are entertained by different things in criticism. Thus I don't begrudge anyone for liking CM, just as I don't begrudge someone who thinks "27 Dresses" is the best movie of all time. There's plenty of critics I think are great who are strident, aggressive, and mostly unwilling to appreciate a film that ventures slightly outside the boundaries of their own narrow aesthetic predilections. What I tend to value in a critic—and this is not to say someone else must value this; it's merely what I value—is curiosity and a willingness to be affected, altered, by a movie in a way that's maybe different from the way he normally likes to be affected by a movie. By curiosity, I just mean that after saying "I didn't like this choice made by X-filmmaker because it does not do this" the critic tries to understand the choice and why it was made, what it's trying to achieve—even if that artistic goal is one he finds objectionable. Since that's my taste, I would enjoy CM's work more if I detected more of these elements in it. That's all I mean. His rhetorical style—the swearing, the open contempt for choices that don't meet his standards—doesn't bother me in the least. Swearing and contemptuousness are what he and I have in common.

Yes, I think that's the attitude one has to have when it comes to figures like CM. I'd even say CM represents a particular genre of criticism—I'll label it "Manic Provocateurism" for conversation's sake. Whatever one calls it, it's a very specific approach to discussing movies. (Actually, his tone is that of someone who expects that his opinion should end the discussion rather than contribute to it, but hey, we could say the same about a lot of critics. Pauline Kael.)

I think part of the reason someone like CM drives people crazy is they don't fully appreciate what you described—that CM comes at movies in a fundamentally different way. When I watch his reviews, I feel like our differences of opinion amount to something more like a language barrier. If I'm speaking Farsi and he's speaking Klingon, his utterances will make no sense to me, and vice-versa—but, both of us would think "Well, clearly all that gibberish makes sense to him... too bad we'll never be able to have a real conversation." 

CM's approach simply seems to ask different questions and has next-to-zero tolerance for filmmakers who make choices other than the ones he would have made. Which I'm fine with, provided there's some curiosity to go with it. But as you indicate, he doesn't really try to appreciate something that doesn't conform to his personal predilections. CM is one of those guys that seems to love his own taste more than he loves movies. Again, I concede that this describes a lot of big-name critics as well.

It was the best movie adaptation of a Shakespeare play I've seen in years, and I think I've seen most of the major ones (even the weird, wild Julius Caesar film that came out of Italy last year). I think the spontaneous, cavalier way Whedon went about it—shooting in a dozen or so days, on a shoestring budget, in his house, with his friends—is, in a sense, similar to the cavalier, slapdash way plays were sometimes staged in Shakespeare's time. I fucking loved it. For the record, I was not a Whedon superfan going into this film (haven't seen everything he's done, but I've seen the 'major works'; always thought he was pretty solid and quite smart, just never worshipped the guy), but this film has made me a superfan. It's the coolest thing he's done that I've seen, and yes I've seen Firefly. OK, ok, take it easy—the coolest thing this side of Firefly.

But I can see why you found it challenging to follow, Teague. At the end of the day, it's still a Shakespeare play, which means it was not written for us—and Whedon didn't alter the Elizabethan language whatsoever (from what I could detect). Some people recommend that people shouldn't worry about spoilers when it comes to Shakespeare plays—i.e., they suggest simply reading the play or its plot summary beforehand, and that this makes seeing a production way more enjoyable. That's been my experience as well. I think it's helpful to read a plot summary for each of the play's acts, and try to know who the major characters are ahead of time. When my girlfriend and I went to see a production of The Tempest, which see had not read or seen before, she decided to read everything except the last act; that way she could follow the play easier but still be surprised by the story's ending.

Upstream Color is pretty wild. For me, it felt like riding the Tilt-A-Whirl. The whole time I'm sitting there saying "This is kind of insane. Am I supposed to be enjoying this?" Then when it's over I say "Yes, totally insane. I didn't realize it, but that actually was me enjoying myself back there."

The first 15-20 minutes are really quite well done—beautiful filmmaking on all fronts. The film never fully regains the sense of urgency it had during that opening stretch, which was my only major criticism of it (other than Carruth as a leading man).

Ha! I actually like The Fatal Attraction poster a lot, actually.

I think auralstimulation mentioned some good ones above—Mother and The Host, plus Oldboy, which is part of the Park Chan-wook "Vengeance" trilogy (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy, and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance). People really like Oldboy a lot. The special edition DVD I have of it is tremendous: it has three discs, multiple commentaries, booklets, physical pieces of film, and other detritus related to the movie. It comes in a big cookie tin.

Oh man, that would be a great topic.

Yeah, you could sense the filmmakers struggling with the fact that his story was way more compelling than his personality. Given the way the film builds up his legend for us before he actually appears, it would be tough for anyone to live up to that hype. Still, it's surprising that the guy didn't have more to say. The first half of the film presents details about his early career, how some record company screwed him, and other stuff, but then when he's finally right there, in the flesh, we don't hear him comment about most of those details. I actually liked the film, but it's peculiar in that way.