(Continued)

Just awakened from coma, a young man (Cillian Murphy), wanders empty, trash-strewn London streets in Danny Boyle's chilling "28 Days Later" (2002). An urban Robinson Crusoe, he's yet to discover that most of his kind, infected by a rage-virus, have become murderous zombies who literally see red. Later, he and a motley crew of survivors find dubious sanctuary at an outpost manned by uniformed brutes given to torture and rape. For these soldiers a fascist patriarchy, in which women and the infected dead are wholly objectified, is the answer to chaos. Comparable brave new worlds show up in "Land of the Dead" (2005), "Delicatessen" (1991), "Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome" (1985), and "A Boy and His Dog" (1975). But in "28 Days Later" civilization finds its last, best hope in a caring, idiosyncratic family (the young hero, his black Eve and a traumatized teen) who live to signal a passing plane -- and maybe God -- by spelling out "HELP" on a green hillside.

Nuclear Winter

After Hiroshima and during the Cold War, the movies' favorite way to end the world was nuclear war, with multiple mushroom clouds marking our final day of reckoning. Films from Hollywood and overseas reflected a pervasive fear -- and worse, a kind of fatalism -- about the kind of nuclear exchange that would leave most of us vaporized, and make the few survivors wish they had been. Such horrific nightmares are best projected in black and white, suggesting a world in shock, irradiated, leached of all but the starkest realities.

"Five" (1951) mostly takes place in and around a wooden lodge perched on top of a California peak, so islanded by mist and mountain ranges it's easy to believe the rest of the world is gone, erased by nuclear war. Both ghost town and Pacific beach, the film's only other locations, look skewed and shadowless, like a surrealist's apocalyptic nightmare. In one heartbreaking, wordless scene, the only woman in a community of five survivors cradles her swollen belly and wonders where the baby's father might be -- while dark sheets of possibly tainted rain stream across the big picture window behind her. As she gives painful birth, the black survivor turns a down-home version of Creation into some kind of prayer: "God said, 'I'm lonely. I'll make me a world.'" A minimalist gem, "Five" quietly buries civilization and all its discontents, leaving Earth in the care of a single couple.

That deep melancholy and remembrance of things past also pervade Stanley Kramer's cautionary "On the Beach" (1959). As Australians wait for wind-borne radiation to reach them from northern strike zones, a party girl (heartbreakingly lovely Ava Gardner) falls in love too late, young marrieds plan their -- and their baby's -- suicide, and an American submarine captain (Gregory Peck) decides he must head home to see his wife -- knowing she is long dead. Impossible to forget the nonstop tapping that lures the submariners on shore near San Francisco -- could it be a survivor's Morse code message? And then there's the tender, resigned rapport between Peck and Gardner, listening to the bittersweet strains of "Who'll come a-waltzing Matilda with me?" as they share one last soft summer evening.

Long after devastating nuclear war, an old woman and her clan of feral young women roam desolate, silent wastelands in the visually arresting black-and-white Czech film, "The End of August at Hotel Ozone" (1967). (Someone described the rarely screened "Ozone" as "On the Beach" meets "Lord of the Flies.") When they happen on a solitary survivor holed up in a rural hotel, their white-haired host happily serves up a candlelight dinner, wine, a music box, memories. The elders share their grief and the old ways of gentle courtesy, while the creatures who will inherit the earth watch, as flat-eyed as wolves. Remorseless, the pack moves on -- to die barren or begin another climb up the evolutionary ladder?

The Next Generation

Men or women -- the dilemma of not having a sufficiency of one or the other plagues the postapocalyptic world. In "Le Dernier Combat," a brute (Jean Reno) manages to beat a somewhat more civilized survivor to the cell where a rare woman is held prisoner. One expects sexual violence, but the reality is far worse.

That kind of cruel foreclosure on the future also occurs in the brilliantly satirical "A Boy and His Dog." In a largely womanless wasteland, our Boy (early Don Johnson) deserts his faithful, telepathic dog to follow a nubile young thing into a subterranean "town," where he is used to juice up Topeka's inbred bloodlines. But when push comes to shove, male -- or at least, boy-dog -- bonding trumps this postapocalyptic Peter Pan's lust for any Wendy.

"Testament" and "The Day After" (1983) both take time to show us the bonds and beauty nuclear holocaust will shatter. All that we take for granted -- the riches of ordinary life -- disappears in a blinding flash. In "The Day After," a gray-faced girl sits in a roofless church, scarlet slowly staining her white dress at lap level. It's a primal image: before Armageddon, she was to have been married in this sanctuary; now she's dying of bloody diarrhea, one of radiation's ugliest symptoms. When a doctor (Jason Robards) counsels, "We must do everything to protect ourselves from fallout," his pregnant patient (Amy Madigan) retorts, "What for?" Later, abandoned in a corpse-filled hospital, the dying woman gives birth, under the dull gaze of the quick and the dead.

Beyond the unspeakable losses in the immediate aftermath of a nuclear war looms a whole other genocide, the death of coming generations. The young father of a newborn (Kevin Costner) walks up a pretty street in "Testament," carrying a drawer from an antique dresser. See, he says, it's just the right size. And a heartbroken mother (Jane Alexander), witnessing her teenaged son's quiet courage, cherishes "the man he's become, the man he'll not live to be."

But when it comes to brutal realism, two British films -- "The War Game" (Peter Watkins' award-winning 1965 documentary) and "Threads" (1984) -- deliver the goods. Watkins juxtaposes the government's insanely optimistic cost analyses and contingency plans with the actual horrors that would follow a nuclear attack. These are terrible enough, but "War Game" focuses on the terrible, clinical depression of human beings who survive such an assault. Someone interviews a clutch of battered, dead-eyed little boys, inquiring what they'd like to grow up to be. "I don't want to be nuthin'," replies one sullen lad.

"Threads" is fiction, chronicling a working-class girl's history from happy days through Armageddon and into nuclear winter, a matter of decades. The film is relentless in its graphic detailing of how life and climate would suffer and decline, and humankind's consequent devolution into savagery. "Threads" opens with a couple snuggled in a car overlooking the town of Sheffield, planning their future. Many years later, their daughter, a feral nomad, stops to give quick birth to a dead infant -- then moves on, leaning in against a chill wind.

This is the way the world ends ... not with a bang or a whimper, but in cold darkness and silence.

What is the most effective apocalyptic movie? Did we leave something out? Write us at heymsn@microsoft.com.

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Kathleen Murphy currently reviews films for Seattle's Queen Anne News and writes essays on film for Steadycam magazine. A frequent speaker on film, Murphy has contributed numerous essays to magazines (Film Comment, the Village Voice, Film West, Newsweek-Japan), books ("Best American Movie Writing of 1998," "Women and Cinema," "The Myth of the West") and Web sites (Amazon.com, Cinemania.com, Reel.com). Once upon a time, in another life, she wrote speeches for Bill Clinton, Jack Lemmon, Harrison Ford, Joe Pesci, Robert De Niro, Art Garfunkel and Diana Ross.