Comedy · War
British (Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb)
1964 · Directed by Stanley Kubrick · 95 min
An American general locks himself in his office and sets a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union in motion. In the Pentagon's War Room, a President, his advisers and a Soviet ambassador scramble to contain the crisis. Kubrick plays the Cold War's most frightening premise as deadpan satire.
Why it matters in cinema history
A central film of 1960s black comedy and Cold War cinema, it showed that a mainstream studio picture could treat the possibility of annihilation as absurd, and helped open the door to the satirical American films that followed.
Watch with intention
Watch how the film makes ordinary bureaucratic politeness and procedure funny, and how that comedy grows more uneasy as the stakes rise.
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