10 Best Apocalypse Movies
6. Dr Strangelove, Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb (1964)
The human race hasn't gotten much closer to a real-world apocalyptic event than during the Cold War, and Kubrick artfully satirised this super-tense period of recent history in his absolute masterpiece Dr Strangelove. The film's settings are decidedly mundane by design, allowing the character drama to take centre-stage to force growing tensions to explode into overblown mayhem as you build towards the seemingly inevitable descent into nuclear war at the behest of these caricatures of superpower politicians.
Strangelove absolutely revels in this dramatic tension by finding comedy almost anywhere. Kubrick stabs at the heart of American consumerism, hyperpatriotism and warmongering on both sides, all the while depicting world leaders as ineffectual, incompetent oafs too obsessed with sex and power to stop and think about their actions.The utterly bleak contrasts with the hyperbolic, creating this ironic, bizarre mood that's just as funny as it is terrifying. You simply won't find better black humour than right here.
It's easy to see why Kubrick's film has endured so well; it's perfectly pitched, and simply genius. The comedy still lands, the performances are still absolutely stellar, and the satire stills stings just as painfully as it inevitably did upon Dr Strangelove's release back in 1964.