Mathieu Ravier, who writes about movies and movie posters from down under at his blog A Life in Film, recently alerted me, via Twitter, to a wonderful collection, on the website of the French newspaper L’Express, of every festival poster of the last 64 years of the Cannes Film Festival. You can see the full collection here, but I wanted to pick out a few of my favorites.

First of all, I have to say that the poster for this year’s festival may be my favorite of them all. The festival has used beautiful black and white photographs of actresses before (Monica Vitti in 2009, Marlene Dietrich in 1992) but those posters have often been let down by their uninspired typography and layout. But this year’s poster, which uses a Jerry Schatzberg photograph of Faye Dunaway at her most gorgeous (a restored print of their wonderful 1970 film Puzzle of a Downfall Child...