20 Disaster Movies You Must See Before You Die

If you haven't heard of Steve De Jarnatt's 1988 cult classic Miracle Mile, track it down ASAP.

This dizzyingly ambitious low-budget apocalyptic thriller centers around a man, Harry (Anthony Edwards), who answers a payphone and is told by the caller that nuclear war is going to break out within 70 minutes.

Cue society going to hell in a handbasket after word quickly gets out, all while Harry and a small group of civilians attempt to figure out whether the call is genuine or a fake.

If its aesthetics and especially its musical score - brilliantly composed by Tangerine Dream - are absolutely of its era, Miracle Mile's themes about information, mass hysteria, and the fear of nuclear obliteration feel supremely well-aged over 30 years later.

Brilliantly nihilistic in its assessment of how humanity would respond to an immediate existential threat, this is one of the most under-appreciated disaster flicks of all time.