Another week, another edition of The Digital Wire. This week, some of the year’s finest and most entertaining films will soon be available for you to own, rent, stream, or just ignore in lieu of reading a good book. There’s also some total junk coming soon, too. I’ll leave it to you to decide which is which.

Below you’ll find info on several future home video releases complete with technical specs, release dates, and links to pre-order at Amazon. We would greatly appreciate it if you use those links to order because a small percentage of each order helps keep this website running at max power. The cover art for certain titles has yet to be finalized.

Hope you all had a great and fulfilling (in more ways than one) Thanksgiving and took plenty of time to rest up because the end of days is upon us. That’s right, the holiday shopping season has begun. Prepare thyself for a retail reckoning this month and feel free to check out this week’s edition of The Digital Wire because we have a few Blu-ray and DVD release tidbits that could be of great interest.

Below you’ll find info on several future home video releases complete with technical specs, release dates, and links to pre-order at Amazon. We would greatly appreciate it if you use those links to order because a small percentage of each order helps keep this website running at max power. The cover art for certain titles has yet to be finalized.

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.

Welcome to another shiny new edition of The Digital Wire! Despite that exuberant fanfare, I am sad to announce that this week has been mighty slim in the realm of Blu-ray and DVD release news and the titles we have to report on won’t get much interest as they are all part of tired franchises, but one of the purposes of this feature is to give such titles the space they deserve. Besides, you may be interested in one or more of them.

Below you’ll find info on several future home video releases complete with technical specs, release dates, and links to pre-order at Amazon. We would greatly appreciate it if you use those links to order because a small percentage of each order helps keep this website running at max power. The cover art for certain titles has yet to be finalized.

The 2014 summer movie season had it share of ups and downs (slightly more of the former than the latter, in terms of quality anyhow) but even the duds usually get another day in court when they depart the theater screens en route to the more pleasant waters of Blu-ray, DVD, and Video-On-Demand. For this week’s edition of The Digital Wire we’ve got a few new release announcements that should be of great interest to you regardless of where your taste in cinema may reside.

Below you’ll find info on several future home video releases complete with technical specs, release dates, and links to pre-order at Amazon. We would greatly appreciate it if you use those links to order because a small percentage of each order helps keep this website running at max power. The cover art for certain titles has yet to be finalized.