Maven's Nest
Reel Life: Flick Pix
The Brink of War is worthy nostalgia for a time when direct talks between adversaries mattered.
By Nora Lee Mandel
The Brink of War
Directed and Written by Michael Russell Gunn
Cinematographer Magdalena Görka
Produced by Sidney Kimmel, Matt Aragachi, Christopher Hammond, Tyler ZaCHARIA, John Logan Pierson and Michael Russell Gunn
118 mins. Rated PG
With: Jeff Daniels, Jared Harris, JK Simmons, Hope Davis, Branka Katic, Aya Cash, Guy Burnet, Tim Dutton, Stephen Brennan, Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson, John Ross Bowie and Catherine Burdon
Release in U.S. theaters on August 14, 2026 by Angel Studios
As a dramatization of the 1986 Summit in Reykjavik, Iceland, between US President Ronald Reagan and USSR Communist Party Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, the theme for The Brink of War is “when leaders chose dialogue over destruction”. But a significant reason to see the film is how the two elderly leaders of the primary countries at war today have mindsets that are stuck in different lessons from these 1980s: US President Donald Trump emulates the build-up of weapons, while Russian President Vladimir Putin sees this beginning of the end of the Cold War as leading to the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.
Debut writer/director Michael Russell Gunn interviewed former Secretary of State George Shultz (who died in 2021 at age 99) about the summit he attended and pointed Gunn to the recently declassified transcripts of the meetings. (The patrician Shultz is portrayed by JK Simmons with an odd combination of obsequiousness and frankness.) The authenticity is reinforced by filming in the same striking locale and even in the same building, the 1909 Höfði House, where they met.
The international cast thoroughly embody the personalities, besides help from effective prosthetics and make-up. Jeff Daniels well adopts Reagan’s folksy, anecdotal talking style, while revealing how haunted he was by the1981 assassination attempt. His wife Nancy did not accompany him, but in their regular phone calls Hope Davis captures both her brittle competitiveness and warmth for her husband.
British Jared Harris so well portrays Mikhail Gorbachev that one can only attribute to Reagan’s strident anti-Communism that he couldn’t tell that this Soviet leader was not like the previous gray loyalist apparatchiks. His stylish, media-wise wife Raisa (Serbian actress Branka Katic) is clearly shown as the first Soviet spouse of her flamboyant kind. Particularly astute is the difference between Gorbachev when he was negotiating personally in the first part of the summit, then his sharp change of tone after he consults with his Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze (played by British Tim Dutton). Today’s viewers, however, may be confused by the Russians’ anger at the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), when it was so commonly called, and is remembered as, “the Star Wars Program” – and was never really politically nor technologically feasible.
In general, at a time when cheap drones are thwarting two big militaries, an on-screen glossary may be needed to keep track of the negotiations over the differences between the likes of ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles), which the Soviets are described as having heavier ones, and SLBMs (submarine-launched ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads), that were resented as the U.S. specialty.
The diplomats from the State Department and Foreign Ministry who were the experts in these differences are unfortunately seen as the seven dwarfs. In reality, Paul Nitze (played by Stephen Brennan), Ken Adelman (played by John Ross Bowie) and Richard Perle (played by Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson) were experienced arms control negotiators. But the stress is on the individuality of the leaders who understand this summit as important to their legacies.
When there were big “No Nukes” demonstrations in the U.S., Europe and Japan, their leadership legacy did eventually bring about nuclear arms reductions. Unfortunately, the current U.S. president thinks the solution is bombing nuclear production facilities, and the current Russian president threatens “strategic” nuclear attacks on a neighboring country that broke from its empire (and had already suffered from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster earlier in 1986). Now negotiations are at a standstill. The Brink of War is worthy nostalgia for a time when direct talks between adversaries mattered.
8/14/2026
Nora Lee Mandel is a member of New York Film Critics Online. Her reviews are counted in the Rotten Tomatoes TomatoMeter:
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My reviews have appeared on: FF2 Media; Film-Forward; Lilith, FilmFestivalTraveler; and, Alliance of Women Film Journalists and for Jewish film festivals. Shorter versions of my older reviews are at IMDb's comments, where non-English-language films are listed by their native titles.
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