Let me tell you about two of my favorite movies. They’re born from the late Cold War and they’re both love stories about the end of the world.

The Man Who Stole The Sun (1979) is a Japanese film about a hip young high school science teacher who, seemingly out of boredom, decides to build his own atomic bomb. After an hour or so of delightfully slow and convoluted 70’s plotting (courtesy of co-writer Leonard Schrader, Paul Schrader’s less famous gaijin brother), our hero terrorist threatens to blow up Tokyo unless they concede to his adorably inane requests, like extending the broadcasts of national baseball games, and inviting the Rolling Stones to play their first concert in Japan. It’s a loving portrait of its time and place, with equal slices of unusual lightheartedness and tense drama.

I’m hesitant to say too much about this wonderful and unpredictable film, because when I first encountered it, I knew nothing more than what was presented to me by the intriguingly psychedelic box art. My friend Yan Yan had picked it up from a street vendor in China without knowing a thing, and that was probably the best way to approach this muddled masterpiece. Unfortunately, it’s not available in the U.S. on DVD, but you can usually find an All-Region copy on eBay. It’s worth seeking out.

Then there’s Miracle Mile, an HBO made-for-TV movie from 1988 where Anthony Edwards accidentally finds out that the nuclear apocalypse is about to go down. Over the next 70 minutes in a neon nighttime Los Angeles, he enters a race against time to save himself, his pink-haired girlfriend, and humanity at large with a plan to escape to a frozen lake in Antarctica, where nuclear fallout may never reach them. Not only this, but the film has a score by Tangerine Dream. It’s a culmination of the Cold War’s fears, a nightmare of nuclear disaster just before the fall of communism.

The last fifteen minutes of the film are some of the most comical and terrifying, as chaos erupts on the streets when the public learns of the world’s impending destruction, resulting in a uniquely Southern Californian traffic jam, and all kinds of maniacal debauchery. Maybe it’s just the times we’re living in, but somehow the end of the world, in all of its forms, is a source of endless fascination– and Miracle Mile gives it to us in its purest form.