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

The mother of all movie satires. If humour is an arabesque over the abysses of terror, the image of Slim Pickens straddling the atomic bomb all the way down to the apocalypse stands out as the sanest and most elegant response to the Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) policies of the Cold War. Stanley Kubrick showed in Paths of Glory and again in A Clockwork Orange that he was a master of biting irony, and how could you find richer material for black comedy than the politics of a nuclear stand-off? Does the film still have a kick today? You bet your precious bodily fluids it does. Peter Sellers’ President Merkin Muffley has something of the folksy, mealy-mouthed nature of Dubya, and if Donald Rumsfeld could head the Pentagon for so long, George C. Scott’s General Buck Turgidson seems almost plausible. Don’t let any preverts stand between you and a chance for a laugh-out-loud seat at the apocalypse.

"Beyond any question the most shattering sick joke I've ever come across."

The New York Times