Review of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) by Johnny T — 01 Apr 2012

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

VERDICT: "High-Quality Stuff" - [Positive Reaction] This is a rating to a movie I view as very entertaining and well made, and definitely worth paying the full price at a theatre to see or own on DVD. It is not perfect, but it is definitely excellent. (Films that are rated 3.5 or 4 stars).