The design of contemporary film posters tends to be driven by the assumption that potential audiences favour the bland. Photographic-montage portraits of the major stars dominate the field, with backgrounds reserved for the indication of genre. A bunch of heads placed against a feathered, swirling setting usually denotes fantasy, but the same set of mug-shots put in a frame of plain white space could be a sign of a Stiller-esque caper. Promoting uniform experiences dressed up in so many ways, these images sell commercial film at its worst.
From the mid-1950s to late 1960s, illustrated posters and handpainted hoardings, by contrast - although often the products of pure economics - added a dimension that is missing from most of today's cinema advertising.

Posters above -

Rancho Texas - Jerzy Flisak
Someone to Watch over me - Andrzej Pagowski
Le Petit Soldat-Der Soldat (Jean Luc Godard) - Jan Lenica
Polish and Czech film posters have a long history of using hand-crafted images as a means of cultural emphasis. Foreign film screenings were relatively rare and needed no advertisement, so, from the state’s point of view, rather than being promotional images, these posters were intended to recast film scenarios in symbolic, often abstract terms, rendering them appropriate for a socialist audience.

The astounding She Monster - artist?
Throughout the hey-day of B movies, an illustrated, or painterly style was the norm.

Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock) - Saul Bass
Arguably the very best proponent of the graphic style for Western audiences was Saul Bass, who over the course of 30 years, created some of the most iconic movie posters of all time - Vertigo, Psycho, and The Man with the Golden Arm, amongst them. His most successful movie partnerships included those with Alfred Hitchcock, and Otto Preminger – Preminger in fact was famed for the vigilance with which he policed cinemas, making sure they promoted his films with the authorized Saul Bass-designed symbols rather than snatched images of their stars.

Baiju Bawrai - artist?
The very last outpost of the illustrated film poster was Bollywood, but unfortunately, even there, the traditional painted image has begun giving way to photography. India's taste in film may remain local, but their graphic taste seems to be veering in a global direction.