A Great Jeff Daniels Performance Delivers a Tense Historical Showdown | Review

Former President and conservative icon Ronald Reagan is having a mini-moment at the multiplex. But this is less a sign of his worthiness as a box-office draw than of niche distributors realizing that catering to a small but receptive (and politically conservative) segment of the moviegoing public can yield decent returns, even if the films themselves are far from decent. In 2024, Dennis Quaid smiled and suffered as our 40th president in the glossy, 141-minute hagiography Reagan. The Brink of War, the latest release from Angel Studios, tackles the Gipper’s presidency from a more promising angle. Its sole interest is the October 1986 nuclear arms-control summit between Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev that unfolded over 30 tense hours at an isolated waterfront house in Reykjavík, Iceland. The summit, even though it ended without an agreement, was still considered a watershed moment in Cold War diplomacy, in part because it brought both leaders surprisingly close to agreeing to eliminate their countries’ nuclear weapons.

source