Perhaps my favourite film

Rating: Null/10 (17 December 1998)

Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece is probably blackest comedy of all time. Peter Seller's is wonderful in all three of his roles, but the creepy, paranoid General Jack Ripper, played by Sterling Hayden, is a remarkable creation. Obsessed by his precious bodily fluids and the threat to his "purity of essence" by the floridation of water, he tells Mandrake: "I don't avoid the company of women, but I won't give them my essence." Made just a couple of years after the Cuban Missile Crisis this film acutely satirises the paranoia of the time, and explains the upturn in sales of concrete bunkers.