Metacritic Film

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

Starring Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, Keenan Wynn, Slim Pickens, Peter Bull, James Earl Jones, and Tracy Reed

MPAA RATING: PG

Columbia Pictures
War
93 minutes | B/W
USA
Released In Theaters January 29, 1964

Through a series of military and political accidents, a psychotic general - U.S. Air Force Commander Jack D. Ripper (Hayden) - triggers an ingenious, irrevocable scheme to attack Russia's strategic targets with nuclear bombs. The U.S. President (Sellers) and Dr. Strangelove (Sellers), a wheelchair-bound nuclear scientist who has bizarre ideas about man's future, work with the Soviet premier in a desperate effort to save the world.

WRITTEN BY
Peter George (novel Red Alert, aka Two Hours to Doom)
Stanley Kubrick
Terry Southern

DIRECTED BY
Stanley Kubrick

Overall Metascore

This is a weighted, normalized average of all individual scores given by critics, on a scale of 0 (worst) to 100 (best).

96 / 100

Critic Reviews

100	ReelViews A masterpiece... The genius of Dr. Strangelove is that it's possible to laugh -- and laugh hard -- while still recognizing the intelligence and insight behind the humor.
100	TV Guide Staff (Not Credited) The film is a model of barely controlled hysteria in which the absurdity of hypermasculine Cold War posturing becomes devastatingly funny--and at the same time nightmarishly frightening in its accuracy.
100	Austin Chronicle More lethal than a nuclear waste dump, Kubrick's komedy at least kills us with laughter... It's one of the greatest - and undoubtably the most hilarious - antiwar statements ever put to film.
100	Chicago Sun-Times Seen after 30 years, Dr. Strangelove seems remarkably fresh and undated - a clear-eyed, irreverant, dangerous satire. And its willingness to follow the situation to its logical conclusion - nuclear annihilation - has a purity that today's lily-livered happy-ending technicians would probably find a way around.
100	Dallas Observer Kubrick's comic gem sparkles with enduring relevance.
100	Village Voice The hard-charging originality of the screenplay—the equivalent of turning "The Hot Zone" into a Farrelly comedy—suggests a deficient legacy of credit to Terry Southern's corner.
100	Boston Globe Is ''Dr. Strangelove" Kubrick's best movie? Along with ''Paths of Glory," absolutely.
100	Chicago Tribune This landmark movie's madcap humor and terrifying suspense remain undiminished by time.
90	Variety Staff (Not Credited) George C. Scott as the fiery Pentagon general who seizes on the crisis as a means to argue for total annihilation of Russia offers a top performance, one of the best in the film. Odd as it may seem in this backdrop, he displays a fine comedy touch.
80	Chicago Reader Yet some of the laughs come too easy and linger too long; for the film's message to have maximum impact, the laughter has to stick in your throat.
70	The New York Times Bosley Crowther The ultimate touch of ghoulish humor is when we see the bomb actually going off, dropped on some point in Russia, and a jazzy sound track comes in with a cheerful melodic rendition of "We'll Meet Again Some Sunny Day." Somehow, to me, it isn't funny. It is malefic and sick.

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