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One of the most unapologetically caustic of all film satires, Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove is a masterful and hilarious portrayal of human incompetence in the most extreme circumstances imaginable. When US Air Force General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) goes rogue and orders a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union through his unsuspecting British executive officer Group Captain Lionel Mandrake (Peter Sellers), President Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers again) hunkers down with his team of military advisors in the Pentagon's War Room to try to stop the attack. Complicating matters are the flag-waving General Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott), Major Kong (Slim Pickens) on board one of the planes carrying the bombs, and the President's mad scientific advisor Dr. Strangelove (Peter Sellers once more). Kubrick applied his (in)famous fastidiousness to the production, making it one of the sharpest and most finely crafted comedies ever put to celluloid. Sellers' iconic triple-performance is complemented wonderfully by the supporting cast of character actors dealing in po-faced absurdity. Both hysterically funny and occasionally unnervingly plausible, Dr Strangelove mixes farce and satire with real-world politics. The film was originally conceived of as a drama (and it famously features narrative overlaps with Sidney Lumet's political thriller Fail-Safe from the same year) and its depiction of egoism, ineptitude, and paranoia is scathing.

PG | Adult themes