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It's time to take a look back at 2008 in movie posters. We're unabashed fans of movie posters here at The Big Picture, because they're probably the best thing about the job. Maybe half the movies you see in a given year are ones you'll recommend, and maybe half of the trailers are average or better. But movie posters are their own animal, and very often some of the best posters are for the worst movies.

The theory on that would be that bad movies need better posters to sell them, and since posters, trailer, and now even full movies are advertisements for something else (why do you think Marvel is planting Avengers hints in its movies three years early?), the better the advertisement, the more people you'll get to try your product that might have otherwise stayed away.

As we've pointed out time and time again, If movie posters didn't work, the studios wouldn't use them.

However, it's not just bad movies that use posters effectively; three of our top five movies of the year are represented in our list, as well. The clear winner of 2008 is The Dark Knight, which has the best marketing scheme ever devised for a movie. If there's one out there better, I'd love to see it. We selected six posters from that film's incredible catalog, and we could've picked a few more.

These are in alphabetical order, not by their ranking, but wouldn't it be wildly coincidental if the alphabetical list were the actual ranking? Oh, and we also limited our list to films released in either the U.S. or the U.K. in the past 12 months.

All of these posters and more can be found at IMP Awards.