Now, after his early 2006 Oscar favorite "Flags of Our Fathers" stumbled at the box office, he springs "Letters From Iwo Jima" on us. Like "Baby," it's arriving several weeks premature and though it speaks Japanese, it is too big, too ambitious and too damn good to be ignored.

In advance of this week's limited release, "Letters" has already been named best picture of the year by both the National Board of Review and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and on Thursday, Eastwood received separate Golden Globe nominations for directing both "Flags" and "Letters."

These two films may make up the unlikeliest matched set in Hollywood history. Certainly, they're unprecedented.

There have been war movies - 1930's "All Quiet on the Western Front," 1970's "Tora! Tora! Tora!" - that have intercut scenes from both sides of the fighting. But while making "Flags of Our Fathers," an account of the U.S. invasion of the Japanese-held island of Iwo Jima in 1945, Eastwood decided to make another movie entirely, one about the Japanese experience during the same battle.

What makes this notion particularly unique is that the U.S. invaded Iwo Jima knowing it would eventually win, and the Japanese dug in their heels knowing they would eventually lose. While the Americans were fighting for victory, the Japanese were fighting for honor.

"Flags" is far more ambitious in structure. It covers the initial invasion and combat, the war-bond tour of the three flag-raisers, and of the men's postwar lives. The movie also cost about three times as much as the $20 million "Letters."

There are flashbacks in the Japanese film as well, but they relate to a handful of well-developed central characters - three officers and two enlisted men.

Two of these officers, played by Ken Watanabe and Tsuyoshi Ihara, have lived in the United States, speak English, and - there's no other way to put it - are noble warriors. A third (Shido Nakamura) is a sadistic bully and a very loose cannon. All three are committed to suicide before surrender, while the enlisted men just want to survive and get home to their families.

That basic conflict of the Japanese military character circa 1945 - the survival instinct versus ritualistic honor - is the gist of this remarkable story.

The "why now?" of "Letters' " early opening is pretty obvious. Even though it is being released in the U.S. by a different studio - Warner Bros. vs. Dreamworks/Paramount - it is coming to the rescue of "Flags." At 76, Eastwood is in command of both sides of the war, and whether the decision to open "Flags" nationally in mid-October was his or the studio's, it was a mistake.

"Letters" won't be - can't be - opened wide. But, in showing it to critics, audiences and the industry before the end of the year, it reinforces the integrity and foundation of "Flags" as an intellectually epic filmmaking project. The two movies together create a tableau of a historical event like no other.

It's a gamble. Even if Academy voters seeing "Flags" and "Letters" back to back are bowled over by their combined scale, how do they vote: "Flags" for Best Picture, "Letters" for Best Foreign-Language Film? Both?