Oliver Stone’s brand is antiestablishment controversy. In his features and documentaries, Stone has blazed a trail as a cinematic scourge of the status quo. Platoon (1986), the Vietnam War veteran’s unflinching, grunt’s-eye view of that imperial debacle, won the Best Picture Academy Award, while Stone scored the golden statuette for Best Director. That year, Stone was also nominated in a screenwriting category for Platoon, as well as for his excoriating look at the Ronald Reagan regime’s Central America foreign policy and mass murder in Salvador.

Stone tackled the “greed is good” capitalist class in 1987’s Wall Street and the extremist right wing in 1988’s Talk Radio. The combat vet returned to Vietnam’s battlefields to win another Best Director Oscar and Best Picture nomination for 1989’s Born on the Fourth of July, a stirring ode to antiwar activism. The iconoclastic JFK (1991) received eight Oscar noms, including for Best Picture and Director, and forever shattered the myth of the Warren Commission’s “lone gunman theory,” pointing a finger at CIA and right-wing renegades for conspiring to assassinate President John F. Kennedy.

Although lesser known than his fiction movies, Stone’s documentaries — about Castro, Hugo Chávez, and Yasser Arafat; 2012’s The Untold History of the United States; and so on — helped solidify his reputation as, arguably, Hollywood’s most left-wing director. But now Stone is going against the grain with his latest nonfiction film. In Nuclear Now, Stone makes a frontal assault on the underlying beliefs of antinuclear activists, arguing that nuclear energy is a solution to the climate crisis.