Letters from Iwo Jima

Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) is Clint Eastwood's war drama, and you can watch it online on iFILM. The fight for the island in early 1945 unfolds entirely from the side that lost it — the Japanese soldiers dug into a bare volcanic rock, told to hold against an invasion no one expects them to survive.

General Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe) knows reinforcements are never coming. He scraps the plan to meet the Marines on the beaches and instead burrows his men into miles of tunnels carved through the cliffs, buying days at a brutal cost. Beside him is Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), a young baker who wants nothing but to get back to a wife and a child he has never met. Their unsent letters, buried in the black sand, hold the whole film together.

Shot almost wholly in Japanese as the companion piece to Eastwood's own Flags of Our Fathers, the film won the Academy Award for Sound Editing and a Best Picture nomination. Its drained, ash-gray palette does as much work as any line of dialogue. Stream Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) online on iFILM.