On the Beach

This is superb. It's brilliantly shot, and Ava Gardner and Fred Astaire are mind-blowingly good. This is also a movie that pulls absolutely no punches about nuclear war. It avoids sentimentality. It steers clear of redemption and utopia. It is simply elegantly and excellently directed. (And I love Anthony Perkins, too.)

I've actually seen much of Stanley Kramer's output as a director (Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, The Defiant Ones, Ship of Fools, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Judgment at Nuremberg), but I haven't really thought of him as an auteur or of his entire body of work at all before. That was foolish of me. This is obviously a man who directed quite a few awesome pictures about the twentieth century's worst atrocities.