Made over a five-year period by a team of young documentary makers, The Atomic Café is a meticulously assembled independent production that focuses an amused eye on the duplicity of Cold War ideology in postwar America through a vast array of excerpts from newsreels, educational films, and government sponsored documentaries about "the bomb." The film displays such landmarks in the arsenal of nuclear propaganda as dispassionate test footage at the Bikini Atoll, the civil-defense "Duck and Cover" advisory (replete with an Andrews Sisters up-tempo tune), and newsreel clips of home bomb-shelter designs. Even twenty years after its release, The Atomic Café remains a compelling, amusing, and cautionary work that suggests the continuing power of the media to reflect, inform, and shape our fears and beliefs.