Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Stanley Kubrick, 1964, USA/UK, B&W, 95 mins, Certificate: PG
Let’s paraphrase the title of this ingenious, cinematic masterpiece, as an alternative way to express the more or less surreal causes of our current anxieties. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the … Brexit Mess. Or Trump. Or Environmental Crisis. Or Inequality. Or whatever (else) bugs you more at this moment in History, when humanity seems once again in need of regressing before ultimately progressing.
Because humor is a life saver. It enables us to utter, face head on and bear unspeakable truths. To ride them out, laughing out loud. And there is perhaps no other film that may be consider such a perfect, hilariously spot on commentary on / indispensable survival tool for our current, mad and disorderly sociopolitical times, on both sides of the Atlantic, than this ageless, ever timeless film by the great Stanley Kubrick.
As the heads of the US government and military are assembled in the Pentagon war room, frantically trying to find a way to avert or at least mitigate the consequences of a nuclear catastrophe put in motion by a paranoid General, echoes of current international political woes and what may be happening in the decisions rooms, behind closed doors, shine through, while Peter Sellers performance in multiple roles is the stuff of legend. Making this film truly unmissable.
Another reason you should not miss it? Our screening not only coincides with “Kubrick: A definitive season” that runs throughout April and May at the BFI Southbank and the Design Museum. It also precedes the scheduled re-release of “Dr. Strangelove” from the 18th of May onward. So think of it as a perfectly timed preview and come and experience it (again) before anyone else!
Reviews:
“Kubrick’s second Peter Sellers comedy is up there with the all-time greats: a brilliant assault on the US’s cold-war mindset, ballasted by a Sellers multiple-character tour de force.” Andrew Pulver, The Guardian
“More lethal than a nuclear-waste dump, Kubrick’s komedy at least kills us with laughter. Thirty-five years after its making, this film seems even more insidiously knowing and “on target” than – and undoubtedly the most hilarious – anti-war statements ever put to film. See it before the world ends.” Marjory Baumgarten, Austin Chronicle
“Baleful and brilliant, Dr. Strangelove…, will outrage a predictable percentage of the population and enthrall an even greater percentage. Candid and Candide-an, beneath its free-form burlesque of some of the most cherished contemporary cliches, Stanley Kubrick’s creation makes visual the underlying anxiety that today stirs uneasily in most of the world’s population… Kubrick has shown before that he is a director of rare gifts. Dr. Strangelove — the name, incidentally, of the Nazi scientist — brings them into full realization.” James Powers, The Hollywood Reporter
★★★★★ “Perhaps Kubrick’s most perfectly realised film, simply because his cynical vision of the progress of technology and human stupidity is wedded with comedy… ;the result is scary, hilarious, and nightmarishly beautiful, far more effective in its portrait of insanity and call for disarmament than any number of worthy anti-nuke documentaries.” Geoff Andrews, TimeOut