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The Cold War may have been paranoidal and expensive, but oh what fun the movies had with it! There's the James Bond series, Billy Wilder's One, Two, Three, and director Stanley Kubrick's 1964 black-comedy masterwork, Dr. Strangelove, in which a renegade general sets the apocalypse in motion. Strangelove is more of an actors' showcase than most of Kubrick's oeuvre (usually he's an auteur with a capital "A"), with memorable, archetype-making performances by George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, Slim Pickens, and a dazzling multirole turn by Peter Sellers. Sellers plays a reserved British captain, a maniacal German-born scientist, and a befuddled U.S. president, whose phone conversation with his Russian counterpart is one of the funniest scenes ever put on film.