Matt Brunson Film Frenzy Aug 12, 2026 4/4

The War Game and The Day After are powerful enough, but Threads is the truly devastating watch.

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Pat Padua Washington City Paper Jun 10, 2026

a convincingly despairing canvas

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Mike Massie Gone With The Twins Aug 23, 2025 7/10

Though it’s far from an engaging film (it’s ghastly and soul-crushing, however), it ought to be required viewing.

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Stephen A. Russell Orion's Shoulder (Substack) May 25, 2025

A staggering telemovie first glimpsed in my youth, it scarred me forevermore with the nagging suspicion that our maddening desire to undo everything is predestined: a scorched earth policy scored into our collective prefrontal cortex.

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Cameron Meier MeierMovies.com May 13, 2025 3.25/5

And above all, over its 112 minutes, it continues to emotionally escalate the inescapable tragedy. This visceral relentlessness is its cinematic modus operandi.

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Eve Tushnet Patheos Sep 18, 2023

I don’t know, what can you say about Threads? I knew its reputation and it lived up to it.

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Farah Cheded A Good Movie To Watch Aug 12, 2023 85/100

The viscerally chilling Threads is the kind of film you only watch once.

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Grant Watson Fiction Machine May 24, 2020 9/10

It is not simply a powerful film, but an important one too.

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Matt Smith Flickering Myth Apr 17, 2019 4/5

An over exaggeration in order to compare today to the days of the Cold War? Most certainly. But a sheet of ice on grey pavement would be a fitting metaphor for Threads, a movie that revels in its simplicity.

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Helen Wood Den of Geek Apr 17, 2019

Shocking, harrowing and hard to watch, it nonetheless made an important contribution to an increasingly urgent debate about the world's ever-growing nuclear stockpile.

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Rick Groen Globe and Mail Apr 17, 2019

It's the accumulation of horrific detail that appalls and truly scares us - not just the putrefying bodies but the severing of civilization's entire network, modern man trapped in modernity's ashes.

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Sam Toy Empire Magazine Apr 17, 2019 5/5

Threads is most successful by its merciless refusal of sentimentality - every second is played for realism; this is a documentary of a nightmare, as we are taken, via a young unmarried couple, through a nuclear strike on Sheffield circa 1984, and beyond.

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Sean O'Neal AV Club Apr 17, 2019

For all its grim hopelessness, Threads had a subtextual faith that people would understand all this before it was too late.

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Peter Bradshaw Guardian Apr 17, 2019

The only film I have been really and truly scared and indeed horrified by - in an intense and sustained way - is Mick Jackson's post-nuclear apocalypse movie Threads.

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Jonathan Hatfull SciFiNow May 15, 2018 5/5

It's perfectly crafted, totally human and so completely harrowing you'll think that you'll probably never want to watch it again.

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Anton Bitel Little White Lies Apr 9, 2018

Threads first aired on BBC2 on 23 September, 1984, and had much the same - albeit vicarious - impact of instant and lasting trauma on its millions of viewers (6.9 million, to be precise) as a megatonne bomb hitting a major city.

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MaryAnn Johanson Flick Filosopher Aug 6, 2005

[S]eared a black furrow across my soul as a teen that has never healed... it still plagues the dim recesses of my imagination.

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