The Rooftop Cinema's line-up this week is strong. Following Casablanca this evening, outdoor cinephiles can look forward to Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation on Tuesday and Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb on Thursday. As evidenced by her other films—The Virgin Suicides and, especially, Marie Antoinette—Coppola is a filmmaker interested in the aesthetics of adolescent ennui: how it looks, sounds and feels to be a young person bored to within an inch of one's life. (Admittedly, the young person in question is usually a young, moneyed woman much like Coppola herself, but still.) Lost in Translation, which features a stand-out performance from Bill Murray at the height of his tragi-comic powers, is a worthy contribution to the filmmaker's ongoing investigation of this aesthetic. Speaking of stand-out performances, Dr Strangelove is oozing with them, from George C. Scott's General "Buck" Turgidson and Slim Pickens's Major "King" Kong to Peter Sellers's remarkable hat-trick turn as Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, President Merkin Muffley and Dr Strangelove himself. But it is Sterling Hayden as Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper who steals the show with his dead-serious belief in "the international communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids". Kubrick's remarkable Cold War comedy still retains its satirical bite—and frightening relevence—today.

Review, 16 January 2010

The Cold War may be over, but with Iran's nuclear ambitions, North Korea stalling on disarmament talks and a nuclear state like Pakistan on the edge of going rogue, Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb still retains its frightening relevance, not to mention its satirical bite. Taking its plot from Peter George's 1958 novel Red Alert, which notably was not a comedy but a thriller, the film revels in the nihilistic absurdity of concepts such as mutually assured destruction, charting what happens after a US general goes "a little funny in the head…you know…just a little…funny" and orders an attack on the Soviet Union. From George C. Scott's General "Buck" Turgidson and Slim Pickens' Major "King" Kong to Peter Sellers' remarkable hat-trick turn as Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, President Merkin Muffley and Dr Strangelove himself, the film features a number of remarkable performances. But it is Sterling Hayden as Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper who steals the show with his dead-serious belief in "the international communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids".

The Australian, 21 January 2010