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

Perhaps Kubrick's most perfectly realised film. Read full review

Kubrick's great 1964 tragicomedy about superpowers on the nuclear brink continues to fascinate new generations of moviegoers, as its frequent reissues attest. A genuine classic. Read full review

Kubrick’s remains perhaps the blackest comedy ever put on screen, and with Peter Sellers brilliantly playing multiple roles, the blackest, funniest movie of the post-war era. Read full review

One of the darkest and bravest comedies ever released by a Hollywood studio. [25 June 1992, p.C7]

The phone scene, in which he's on the hot line to his Russian counterpart, is a classic of prevarication, a masterpiece of nothingspeak in the face of disaster. [28 Oct 1994, p.48]

No other movie has so masterfully conveyed the folly of nuclear warfare, or poked such savage fun at a military that wages it. Stanley Kubrick's coal-black comedy has a timeless quality that will probably extend beyond disarmament. [6 Aug 1995, p.2B]

Cool, chiseled and savagely funny, Kubrick's cautionary doomsday farce never ages but gets more relevant with time. [12 March 1999, p.D15]

The definitive movie of the genre - a scathing satire of the warped logic of atomic confrontation with a brilliant cast led by Peter Sellers, George C. Scott and Sterling Hayden. [14 July 2001, p.E01]

Remains funnier than almost any comedy made in this generation. And since we are, once again, embarked in global warfare, it's as timely as it has ever been. [24 Apr 2004, p.67]

Simultaneously funny and frightening, Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 satirical masterpiece. [25 Apr 2004, p.3]

Stanley Kubrick's wicked sendup of the then-burgeoning military-industrial complex is still lacerating today. Which is better, George C. Scott's bull-like portrayal of Gen. Buck Turgidson ("Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed") or the Peter Sellers trifecta of Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake, Dr. Strangelove and President Merkin Muffley? You'll watch it and weep -- from laughter and maybe just a hint of despair. [13 June 2004, p.N03]

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. Read full review

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. Read full review

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. Read full review

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. Read full review

Kubrick's comic gem sparkles with enduring relevance.

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. Read full review

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

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

It lampoons a crazed warmongering machismo that never goes out of style. Read full review

Baleful and brilliant, Dr. Strangelove; Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, will outrage a predictable percentage of the population and enthrall an even greater percentage. Read full review

Shooting Dr. Strangelove as if it were Paths Of Glory makes its ridiculous elements at once funnier and more chilling, emphasizing the Cold War’s inherent insanity. Read full review

I can never watch it without a bowel-liquefaction of fear. Read full review

Dr. Strangelove is unique as an American studio film in that nearly every scene addresses its alignment of military action with sexual impotence and bodily excretion. It’s possibly the filthiest studio comedy ever made, even though there isn’t a single gross-out gag, curse word, or graphic image in its entire running time. Read full review

The collapse of the Cold War may have left Kubrick's satire on mutually assured destruction less relevant than it was, but it still features Peter Sellers' finest three performances as well as proving that the supposedly humourless Kubrick was up for a laugh. Read full review

By a whopping margin, this is Kubrick’s most radical film and greatest dramatic gamble. Read full review

Kubrick originally planned Dr. Strangelove as a straight drama. That he realized the absurdity of the whole thing is a testament to his intelligence; that he pulled it off so brilliantly is a testament to his talent. Read full review

Kubrick’s film is the most accurate and timeless portrayal of a world facing mutually assured nuclear destruction, and paradoxically accomplishes this feat not through a realistic study but through the blackest surrealism. Read full review

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. Read full review

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. Read full review

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. Read full review

After suffering through two screenings of Dr. Strangelove, I would sooner drink hemlock.... To me, Dr. Strangelove is an evil thing about an evil thing; you will have to make up your own mind about it. Read full review