The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025
62. 1964 - Dr. Strangelove
Honourable Mentions: Onibaba, The Train, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
The Cold War was a lot of things: paranoid, scary, horrifically destructive, but it was also hilarious. The scale of the arms race between the East and West, the constant posturing, subterfuge, and proliferation of enough nuclear material to blow us all to Kingdom Come five times over, deployed on a 24-hour cycle and held together by sticky tape and the hope that human error won't factor into the equation - it's a patently ridiculous state of affairs that would be enough to drive anyone into a pit of anxiety if they dwelled on it for too long.
Unless, of course, you laugh. (Which is what Stanley Kubrick did.)
1964's Dr. Strangelove (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb) is a film devoted to that belief - a chaotic masterpiece that takes aim at everything from Operation Paperclip to the absurdity of nuclear diplomacy. The farce is made complete by the stupendous talents of Peter Sellers and George C. Scott, the latter of whom was actually deceived by Kubrick into providing the humorous takes that made the final cut.