Sands of Iwo Jima
Blu-ray|DVD
Directed by Allan Dwan
Story by Harry Brown; Screenplay by Brown and James Edward Grant
Starring John Wayne, John Agar, and Forrest Tucker
Olive Films
Release Date: November 11, 2014

When it comes to vintage war movies Sands of Iwo Jima is about as old-fashioned as they can get. It was one of the last memorable features made by the late Allan Dwan, a Canadian-born filmmaker who had began working in the motion picture industry during its pre-sound infancy, and it starred silver screen legend John Wayne in one of his most iconic leading roles. In the decades that followed Sands‘ theatrical release, war movies got meaner, bloodier, and introspective about what it means to kill for your country, so Dwan’s film can’t helped but be regarded today as an antique from a different era of cinema history.

However, that hardly means Sands of Iwo Jima doesn’t bring to the table many of its own virtues, the most important being that it’s highly entertaining and features the Duke stepping outside his movie star comfort zone to deliver an actual performance to rank with his turns in the classic westerns Red River and The Searchers. At this point in his career Wayne had been firmly established as a star of big screen westerns and war epics. During World War II he saw celluloid combat in The Fighting Seabees, Flying Tigers, Back to Bataan, and John Ford’s They Were Expendable. Wayne could always be counted on to provide a hearty stew of sensitivity and machismo and marshal the war effort with his effortless performances. Sands wasn’t his last combat film, but it was probably one of his best.

Pacific Rim
Blu-ray/DVD/Digital l DVD/Digital l Instant
Directed by Guillermo del Toro
Written by Travis Beacham and Guillermo del Toro
Starring Charlie Hunnam, Idris Elba, Charlie Day, Ron Perlman, and Rinko Kikuchi
Warner Home Video
Release Date: October 15, 2013

The summer of 2013 will likely go down in history as one of the most schizophrenic moviegoing seasons of all time. The third installment of a superhero franchise avoided the creative traps that X-Men: The Last Stand, Spider-Man 3, and in a sense The Dark Knight Rises handily fell into. A Star Trek sequel four years in the making and with near-unlimited support from fans new and old and a massive budget turned out to be a lazy and uninspired quasi-remake of the greatest Trek feature of them all. Superman flew on the silver screen again in a much-touted reboot that was one-third a good movie and two-thirds a Zack Snyder movie. The funniest movies were R-rated comedies from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean about the end of the world starring predominantly male ensembles.

But most peculiar of all, this was the summer that a movie about giant monsters from another dimension emerged from the sea to enslave the human race only to be opposed in grand fashion by skyscraper-sized machine men powered by mentally-linked pilots co-written and directed by the acclaimed Mexican master of fantastic cinema Guillermo del Toro required a heavy dollop of grassroots support in order to avoid getting trounced too hard at the weekend box office by an insipid Adam Sandler sequel. Despite only making a quarter of its $407 million worldwide haul here in the States – and that’s including the 3D ticket sales – Pacific Rim struck a real nerve among lovers of science-fiction and fantasy movies of the past, and is believed by many to be not just one of summer’s most entertaining movies, but also one of the best movies released this year by far. Now del Toro’s splashy monster mash is available on Blu-ray so that audiences that missed out on seeing it on the big screen can experience the FX-enhanced mirth and mayhem in the comfort of their own homes.