There's a girl with a girl in her head. Turn around and read my sign, girl with the girl in her head.

There's a man with a man in his stomach. There's also some sort of camera lens. No wonder the man looks so unhappy. Don't shoot the man in your stomach, man with the man in his stomach.

The TV People are in front of the girl, generating enough static elecriticity to pull her hair forward. So why is her hair standing up in the back? It's because the graphic artist studied art and not, ya know, science.

This is one tragic poster. Cobbled together from other images, the visual sweep from Nick Fury to Quicksilver is messy, and the disjoined lighting makes Vermeer cry. The Vision in back? It's all but impossible to distinguish him from Magneto, who isn't even in this movie. Worst of all, there's is nothing about this poster that says "team." But it does say, "Admire my Hulk deltoids."

How hard is it to get three people standing next to each other to share the same lighting scheme? Apparently, it's impossible. I can't believe I even asked about it. And why did the graphic artist place a ridiculously bright light flare in the cloudy sky above the Thing's head? Because if they are trying to convince me that it's a sunbreak, they've failed.
 

Lava is flooding from Arnold Schwartzenegger's head, pouring onto the man beneath him. In fact, the lava flow is so prodiguous, it engulfs the city below it in flame. A whole city. Burned by Arnold's head lava. Yet that's not nearly as disconcerting as Arnold's eyes staring off in different directions.

Thanks to her fire wings, Katniss has taken a flying leap while drawing her bow and arrow. Notice how her hair isn't moving, even though she's supposedly in motion. There's a beak growing out of her shoulder. Fly, Katniss, fly! 

A girl is falling out of the sky. She's shooting heaven on her way down. Her bullets have probably nicked an angel's kidneys. No wonder they kicked her out. But unlike Katniss, at least her hair is moving.

It's romantic, the two of us, standing in front of Jupiter, so tall we can't hear the screams of the city we're standing on. You have a pretty skull. Worst of all, Warner Bros could have gone any number of its lovely alternative posters (find them at impawards.com). Instead, it chose the poster that played funsies with the square-cube law.

Have you ever tossed some junk onto a wall to see what would stick? Is that just me? No, it isn't...because the designer of this poster had the same idea.

An impossibly large Pac-Man swallows San Francisco. What do you have against San Francisco, Pac-Man? Not enough foam on your latte? 

Although the oversaturated color is mod cool, as is the car, the villain has no reason to be a disembodied head. (Also, looming over the bad guys only works if you're a Sith Lord.) Worse than that, the foreground has nothing to do with the mod colors of the background. This poster could have been terrific. Instead, it's just confusing. 

It's not a bad poster. It's not a good one, either. The gray palette almost washes out every element on the poster: The radiation sign is practically indistinct. Also, I didn't realize makeup and tweezed eyebrows would be a priority during the apocalypse. 

A pretty girl. A beautiful dress. An expensive shoe. The poster is reasonably attractive. However, if you take away the title, you would have no idea that this movie is Cinderella. Still, this represents the first of the "not bad but not good" batch.  

Agent 47 has his suit, his red tie, his gun. The poster artist even fit it in to the number 47. But at first glance, the triangle of white looks superimposed on the assassin's face. A terrific idea. The execution, though, is a bit lacking.   

The proportions here are off, but not so badly that it hurts my brain. That's how low my standards are. See what you've done to me, 2015?

The first of the "humorous" posters, Cooties' background, foreground, and middle don't match up stylistically (background is shrunk; foreground is overly blurry; middle is overly bright). But the poster promises a wacky gore-filled adventure, and the movie delivers.

A play on the James Bond-style "two legs in front" image, I get both the humor and horror that the poster conveys. It's clear that the characters were 'shopped in the background. Unlike the execreble Avengers poster, however, the graphic designer made an attempt to light the characters consistently. 

Good sense of motion. I can almost forgive the tiny head in the car.

This is a poster for a kid movie. Adults, you may tag along if you'd like, but don't expect more to the movie than color bubbles. Oh look, words that say, "Meet the little voices inside your head." Oh gods, how did they know about the voices in my head?

Oh, those wacky Minions. The poster is cute as a button. No surprises here, though. 

Adults, you may come to this movie too. But with this wacky cast of characters, you can expect more than color balls. You can expect Dracula, the Mummy, Frankenstein, the Invisible Man, and some hyena creatures. 

Simple. Clean. To the point. Good stuff.

Another poster that suffers from chromophobia, and it's obvious the characters' photos were taken separately. Only unlike Z for Zachariah, there are fewer elements on the poster, so the characters have more impact. The "Save Her" scribble in white adds a sense of urgency. 

Attractive poster with decent balance. Points for making me look harder at Gazelle's blade-running legs. But as with Ant-Man, why does Merlin deserve a spot on the poster when Roxy does not?

What first came to mind: They're creepy and they're kooky. Mysterious and spooky. They're altogether ooky. The Crimson Peak family. What came to mind after that: The graphic designer used a lovely, luscious red that made the poster pop. Classic "haunted family in haunted house" look.

Even with the multiple uses of "Hilarious" in the background, the poster manages to be clean. The characters make me smile. Love the font fangs.

The movie was, well, panned. But with a ship in the air, sailing into the moon, Pan has a wonderful representation of a sense of wonder in a genre that should be brimming with it. (Only two other posters were this optimistic.) I also like how the artist fit "pan pipes" into the logo. I just wish the light source didn't come from a freakin' lens flare behind the moon.

Chappie can spell his name. When he learns to read the word "reject" on his head, Chappie is going to use that gun on someone. But seriously, the faded childish scribblings on the wall sells it. Shame about the movie.

This poster will give you any color you want, as long as it's blue. Pity, because unlike every other poster here, the ridiculous sense of scale is actually plot relevant. 

Dear gods, again with the overuse of blue. But the poster is saved by a receding tunnel that almost but doesn't quite end in a vanishing point--because instead of a point, we see two characters. The dark at the end of the tunnel promises to be very dark indeed. 

In one of the niftiest tricks I've seen in a poster, Star Wars: The Force Awakens presents the color spectrum clockwise, with violet starting at 1 o'clock and red taking up 8 o'clock onward. There's good use of conflicting angles, too. But unfortunately, it's also messy. I recognize the homage to artist Drew Struzan, who did the wonderful posters for the second trilogy, even if it lacks Struzan's restraint. Also, it has a Sith lord looming in the corner...looking away from the characters. He should be looking down on them, because that's how Sith lords do.

In the first of what I consider the "very good" set of posters, we see a woman sitting up in bed, frightened. Light hits like a slash across her face and body. Disturbing but not excessively so.

Man in foreground looks away from the chaos in the background. Off-kilter angle gives you the feeling that something isn't right. Thumbs up for the crispness of the background images, which in recent years have been blurred out to emphasize the actors in the foreground. (See the poster for Green Lantern for one of the more egregious examples.)

Vin Diesel, who I swear is not John Constantine, continues his love affair with poorly lit movies. (The variant posters are even more black, if not pitch black <—see what I did there?) The poster's vertical lines evoke a sense of scale, while the diagonal lines of Diesel's coat and sword make him stand out.  Again, points for the light coming from an actual source. 

James Bond looks out at the camera and stands ready for action. Nice use of black-and-white without being too oppressively dark. The only color in the poster come from his ice-blue eyes. It's a view to a kill. One serious misstep, though: The words "Coming Soon" are plastered right beneath Bond's crotch. Wow. Just...wow.

This poster is only the second out of three with a sense of optimism and awe, something sadly lacking in this year's crop of posters. And as it happens, that sense of discovery the entire point of the movie. Also, and thank the graphic artist in charge--the light is coming from an actual source, the sun. This could have ranked higher had the non-George Clooney character been more distinctive.

Here's a man in a space suit with a broken faceplate. His expression is a subdued WTF, but he's facing his problem head on. In other words, the poster for The Martian tells you everything you’d to know about the film. Best of all, the words "Bring him home," which come in a thin yet distinctive font, don't detract from his face. In fact, they emphasize the look in his eyes. 

Simple. Sweet. Smile-worthy. This poster stands out above the other kid-movie posters for its use of black. Although we've seen "magic" represented as sparkles of light, the magic here comes from an actual source: fireflies. The best of the three optimistic posters.

With the placement of the characters, the poster tips us off to the trick that Max isn't actually the star of his movie. Furiosa sits front and center--and Max is wearing a muzzle. He's driving, paying no attention to us. Furiosa is the one who's engaging the audience. And she's even grimier than the logo. 

This poster is a delightful play on the horror posters of the 1980s, even down to the bloody-lettered font found in movies like The Howling. But this poster has something no other poster has: fake fold lines. Awesome touch.

Instead of a blatantly frightening image, here we get a sampler, a type of embroidery popular in the 18th and 19th centuries, otherwise known as your great-grandma's folk art. This sampler isn't just stained from age. It has bloody fingerprints clutching at the edges. The familiar and cozy is suddenly unsettling and dangerous.

It's a topsy-turvy world, and our hero is just trying to grab a hold of it: That's what the poster is promising, and it's something that the movie is bound to deliver. It's use of angles is dizzying and clever, and it eschews the standard colors. Of course, this poster isn't sci-fi, it's "spy fy." That's right. The best movie poster of the year is only barely in the genre. 

Better luck to us all in 2016.