A singular accomplishment, getting us to laugh at our total nuclear annihilation. Looking back, are the early ’60s Kubrick’s Comedy Period, or was he just working with Peter Sellers a lot? There are certainly funny moments in the remaining half-dozen movies he’d make after Dr. Strangelove, but there’s also a sense of, OK, if we’re going to do a real comedy, let’s do the last one. Is that idea arrogant or visionary? Probably both, as evidenced by the fact that Strangelove’s ticking-clock doomsday scenario, played straight the very same year as Fail Safe, would be revived in countless action/thriller movies of greater fake gravitas but lesser genuine artistry in the decades since blowing up the Cold War. In more retrospective news: Peter Sellers probably deserved that Best Actor Oscar for his triple role here as a British officer, American president, and German psychotic. (Weirdly, a year later Lee Marvin became the only actor before Michael B. Jordan to win a Best Actor Oscar for a multiple-role job, in the less ambitious Cat Ballou.) For that matter, George C. Scott is arguably in career-best mode as General Buck Turgidson, at least as worthy as his version of General Patton, which won him a Best Actor Oscar some years later. What a picture that can serve as Kubrick’s joint farewell to 1950s values, black-and-white cinematography, and the human race.

1. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

In truth, I’ve probably seen several other movies on this list more times than 2001. The thing about 2001, though, is that it feels bigger than cinema— or at least, the same size as the medium itself. It was the first film I ever saw projected in 70mm, and the vividness of that print has taken up permanent residence in my brain, probably enhanced by the honeying process of memory. The most poetic of stuff-goes-wrong-in-space movies, one that’s still creating an impossible standard nearly 60 years after its release, follows a mission to investigate the appearance of an alien monolith, first seen in the stunning prehistoric opening sequence. The astronauts run into trouble when the on-board computer HAL disagrees with some of their decisions and decides to fight back against them. The film’s most memorable characters, of course, are the unnamed dawn-of-man hominids at the beginning of the film and the placid-sounding HAL, making this a simultaneous pre-human and post-human movie. (Is there a live-action American film this beloved where so few people could name any of its stars offhand?) Though the movie contains plenty of dialogue, even some much-quoted phrases from HAL, it often sails into the realm of pure cinema, especially in its stunning lightshow climax, at once mysterious and direct. Appropriately, Kubrick won his only Oscar for the film—and even better, it was for visual effects, not directing or writing. In this particular and inimitable achievement, what’s the difference?