If you are of a certain age, you will almost certainly remember that 50 years ago this October, it seemed as if the world—or at least a big chunk of it—was about to come to an end. The U.S. military had placed long-range ballistic missiles in Turkey, capable of reaching Moscow and points beyond; in response, the Soviets placed long-range ballistic missiles in Cuba, capable of reaching Washington. Nikita Khrushchev railed, John F. Kennedy barked back, and the military commands of two nations girded for the war that Stanley Kubrick would soon lampoon in his film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

At the time, there was nothing funny about what would come to be known as the Cuban missile crisis, an event portrayed in the highly effective film Thirteen Days, with the stoical Kevin Costner in his usual fine form, Bruce Greenwood excellent in his portrayal of Kennedy, and the always reliable Kevin Conway quite scary as General Curtis LeMay, who never met an object he didn’t want to bomb. The Soviets are less completely presented, apart from actors playing Andrei Gromyko and Anatoly Dobrinyn, which raises a question worthy of further research: Is there a film depicting events from the Soviet point of view?

Costner does memorable work in another film relating to John Kennedy, namely Oliver Stone’s JFK, which, while very good, is a touch baffling: instead of one conspiracy theory concerning the Kennedy assassination, it manages to work in several. That said, it’s a worthy entry in a double billing. And if you want to spend a rainy Saturday on filmic portrayals of John Kennedy, there’s always Cliff Robertson doing stalwart duty in the fine film PT 109, depicting an incident in World War II that would first bring the future president into the spotlight.