Guess the
Film

№ 01 · LandingThe quiz

Guess the Film — A Movie Poster Quiz for Cinephiles

Think you know your cinema? We're not talking blockbusters with logos and taglines. We're talking the poster alone — the composition, the colour, the mood — and your job is to name the film.

Twenty posters. Twenty chances to prove you actually watch films, not just scroll past them.

How It Works

Each round presents a single movie poster — no title, no cast, no year. You type the first word of the film's title and hit enter. Get it right, move on. Get it wrong, you'll know what you missed.

The selection leans toward the kind of cinema that gets talked about for years. You'll find mainstream films that defined their decade alongside art-house releases that deserved ten times the audience they got. Some are immediately obvious. Some will haunt you after you see the answer.

Why Posters?

A great movie poster is a piece of graphic design that has to do something almost impossible: capture the entire emotional register of a two-hour film in a single image. The films that do this best tend to be the ones worth watching.

Who Is This For?

Anyone who thinks they watch too many films and wants to find out if that's actually true. Film students. People who have strong opinions about aspect ratios. Anyone who's ever stayed through the credits.

No sign-up required. No timer. Just you, twenty posters, and the uncomfortable realisation that you maybe haven't seen as many films as you thought.

№ 02 · ArticleClassic posters

Name the Movie: 20 Classic Posters Every Film Fan Should Recognise

Movie posters have been a serious art form since the silent era. Long before trailers and social media campaigns, a poster was often the only thing standing between a film and its audience. The best ones became as iconic as the films themselves.

Here are 20 classic movie posters that any genuine film fan should be able to name on sight — and what makes each one work.

The Anatomy of a Recognisable Poster

The posters that stick in memory do a specific thing: they communicate a film's essential character in a single image. Not the plot. Not the cast list. The character — the emotional register, the visual world, the feeling you'll carry out of the cinema.

The most recognisable posters tend to be:

• Minimalist — they reduce the film to one image or symbol
• Colour-coded — a single dominant palette signals genre and mood
• Character-driven — a face or figure that IS the film
• Typographically distinctive — the font is part of the identity

The Test

Can you name a film from its poster alone — no title, no cast, no year? That's what the Movie Names Quiz is built around. Twenty posters, each chosen because they are both visually distinctive and genuinely worth watching.

Some will be obvious in under a second. Others require the kind of accumulated film knowledge that only comes from actually watching things rather than adding them to a watchlist.

№ 03 · ArticleThe hard part

The Hardest Film Quiz You'll Take This Year

Most online movie quizzes test whether you remember which actor was in which franchise. This one is different.

The Movie Names Quiz tests whether you can identify a film from its poster alone — no title, no cast, no year. Just the image. It sounds simple until you're staring at a poster you've walked past in a cinema lobby three times and cannot, for the life of you, remember what it's called.

Why Poster Recognition Is a Different Skill

Remembering plot beats is passive. You experienced the film, and the story stayed. Poster recognition requires you to have actually paid attention to the visual language of cinema — to have noticed, even unconsciously, what a film looked like before you watched it.

The people who are good at this quiz tend to be the same people who notice the aspect ratio change in The Grand Budapest Hotel, or who can tell a Kubrick film from a single still. It's a visual memory test as much as a film knowledge test.

What Your Score Means

• 0–5: You probably prefer TV. No shame in that.
• 6–12: Solid film knowledge. You've done the watching.
• 13–17: You've either been to a lot of film festivals or you spent your formative years in a cinema.
• 18–20: Either you've played this before, or you're genuinely unwell about cinema. Both are valid.

№ 04 · ArticleArt-house

Art-House Cinema Posters: Can You Name These Indie Classics?

Art-house cinema has a poster problem: the films are often too strange, too specific, or too deliberately uncommercial for traditional marketing to work. The posters that result are frequently the most interesting in cinema — designed for people who will actively seek out a film based on aesthetic alone.

What Makes an Art-House Poster Different?

Mainstream movie posters communicate genre, star power, and spectacle. They need to sell a film to someone who's never heard of it in the three seconds they spend looking at a cinema lobby display.

Art-house posters operate under different constraints. Their audience is smaller but more engaged. They can be more abstract, more typographically adventurous, more willing to use negative space.

The Quiz Connection

The Movie Names Quiz includes posters from across this spectrum. Some are identifiable to anyone who's spent time in an independent cinema. Others are known mainly to people who read film criticism or attend festivals.

№ 05 · GuideGetting better

How to Get Better at Identifying Films by Their Posters

Movie poster recognition is a learnable skill. Most people who are good at it didn't set out to become good at it — it accumulated over years of paying attention to the visual side of cinema. But you can accelerate the process.

1. Notice Posters Before You See Films

The most effective thing you can do is actively look at movie posters rather than absorbing them passively. When you walk past a cinema, stop. When you scroll past a film on a streaming service, look at the thumbnail. Ask yourself: what is this poster telling me about this film?

2. Learn the Aesthetic Periods

Film poster design has distinct historical periods, and being able to date a poster gets you most of the way there. The early studio-era illustrated posters. The psychedelic late 1960s. The high-concept minimalism of the 1970s and 80s. The photographic realism of the 90s.

3. Watch the Difficult Ones

The films in the Movie Names Quiz that people fail most often are the ones people haven't seen. This is obvious in retrospect. The most efficient path to poster recognition is watching the films.

№ 06 · ArticleThe films

From Amélie to Paterson: The Films That Inspired This Quiz

The Movie Names Quiz is built around a specific kind of cinema: films that have strong visual identities, that reward attention, and that tend to stay with you. Not every film achieves this. Most are forgotten in the car on the way home. The ones in this quiz weren't.

Amélie (2001)

Jean-Pierre Jeunet's film is one of the most visually distinctive of the last 25 years. The green-amber colour palette, applied consistently across every scene, became so influential that it's now called the "teal and orange" style in contrast — Amélie pushed back against the cold, desaturated look that was becoming mainstream.

The poster is immediately recognisable: Audrey Tautou, centre frame, that expression, that colour. If you've seen it, you know it. If you haven't, the poster is reason enough to find it.

Paterson (2016)

Jim Jarmusch's film about a bus driver who writes poetry is the opposite of Amélie in almost every formal dimension. Where Amélie is stylised and saturated, Paterson is naturalistic and grey. Where Amélie is propulsive, Paterson is still.

The poster reflects this: a face, a landscape, a quietness. It's designed for people who will actively seek out a film about a bus driver who writes poetry. The people who find it tend to find it valuable in a way they struggle to explain.