By Dawn's Early Light

By Dawn's Early Light (1990) is a Cold War HBO thriller you can watch online on iFILM, adapted from William Prochnau's novel Trinity's Child. The setup is efficient and merciless: a rogue Soviet warhead destroys the city of Donetsk, and every failsafe designed to prevent a nuclear exchange begins failing in sequence.

Powers Boothe and Rebecca De Mornay play the crew of an American bomber that receives launch orders mid-flight — and must decide whether to carry them out while the chain of command has broken down. James Earl Jones, Martin Landau, Darren McGavin, and Rip Torn fill the rooms where the real decisions are being made. Director Jack Sholder keeps the pacing tight and the moral weight real. For a TV movie from 1990, the scenario holds up better than it should. Stream By Dawn's Early Light (1990) online on iFILM.