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

EMAIL PRINTColumbia Pictures

9.2 User Score:

Universal acclaim

Based on 11 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?

Based on 99 votes
Read user comments
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Movie Info

Genre(s): War

Written by: Peter George (novel Red Alert, aka Two Hours to Doom)
Stanley Kubrick
Terry Southern

Directed by: Stanley Kubrick

Release Date:
Theatrical: January 29, 1964
DVD: November 2, 2004

Running Time: 93 minutes, B/W

Origin: USA

Summary

RATING: PG

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

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.

Also On Metacritic

FILM: 2001: A Space Odyssey A Clockwork Orange Eyes Wide Shut Full Metal Jacket The Shining

Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database Official Studio Site

What The Critics Said

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

100

ReelViews James Berardinelli

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.

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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.

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100

Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

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.

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100

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

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.

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100

Dallas Observer Gregory Weinkauf

Kubrick's comic gem sparkles with enduring relevance.

100

Village Voice Michael Atkinson

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.

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100

Boston Globe Ty Burr

Is ''Dr. Strangelove" Kubrick's best movie? Along with ''Paths of Glory," absolutely.

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100

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

This landmark movie's madcap humor and terrifying suspense remain undiminished by time.

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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.

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Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

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.

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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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What Our Users Said

The average user rating for this movie is 9.2 (out of 10) based on 99 User Votes

Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

David S. gave it a10:
Dr Strangelove is the comedy version of the movie Failsafe,where a Churchillian typeNeoconservative advisor to the Defense Department(sound familer?)played by Walter Matthue advises an all out attack on the Soviet Union,when a B-52 mistakenly crosses into Russian airspace during a war game.Kuburick refreshingly does do the left-right cliches in Strangelove.The Red menace was rattling sabers all over the globe in that period,from erecting the Berlin Wall,Cuba,SothEast Asia.The famous German scientists-Von Braun,Dornberger,Oberth,Rudolf were always in the headlies while they ran NASA.We see the British officer protrayed hilariously by Sellersas well.The President is the personification of Adlai Stevenson.All of this makes the film both topical,and timeless.

Marcel C gave it a10:
I would give it a 9.5, Dr. Strangelove should have appeared more in the movie. The acting is also awesome and the film have the black comedy, satirical and sometimes nonsense touch which is so difficult to find well placed in a movie nowadays.

Joe Bob gave it a10:
This was a great movie. Don't listen to lee b. werner von brauhn might have been german, but he was a great man, and led our country into the future of space exploration.

Coco Bunny gave it a10:
A satirical masterpiece.

Martin L gave it a10:
Peter Sellers gave a great performance in all the roles he played in this movie, but George C. Scott stole the show. This movie is a great glimpse into the paranoia of the Cold War. It is an example of how powerful a comedy can be If done right.

lee b gave it a10:
Without a doubt *the* greatest satiric screenplay of the 20th Century, only less dark than the far more disturbing and blacker comedy of Silence of the Lambs. To understand Dr. Strangelove you have to understand a Cold War era when the likelihood of nuclear holocaust seemed imminent and anti-Communist paranoia was still running very high. You think Sarah Palin is bad? The script savagely lampoons the real post-McCarthy wing-nuttery of the age, from anti-fluoridation reactionary groups like the John Birch Society to real nuclear war advocates speaking flippantly of maximum body counts during a full-scale nuclear war. The script roasts them all and takes a good wide swing at a few other soft spots in American society -- the use of Nazi scientists (we got to the moon on the shoulders of non other than Verner von Braun's leadership), the anti-commie paranoia that bordered on psychosis (the McCarthy era was pretty bad), the euphemistic "Peace is Our Profession" whitewash of the DOD (which led us to millions of deaths in S.E. Asia) and so on. Strangelove takes it to the logical extreme in a sarcastic - even jugular - vein, demonstrating the inanity of anti-fluoridation paranoia via a psychotic general admitting his withholding ejaculation in defense of his precious bodily fluids. This is examined in relation to fluoridation and the various epigrammatic phrases peace on earth, preserve our essences and purity of essence also revealing to us the acronymic three-letter cipher prefix necessary to cancel the attack.

James M. gave it a10:
A powerful message to mankind in any era.