Films about death and dying, especially those about children and adolescents with terminal illnesses, are generally not box office hits. You’d have to go all the way back to 1970’s Love Story to find a film about a young woman’s fight against impending death that brought in major coin. You’d have to go back even further to 1962’s David and Lisa to find a critically-lauded film about adolescents falling in love in a clinical setting. Until now, that is.

Director Josh Boone, whose first film two years ago was the marvelous, albeit little-seen romantic comedy-drama, Stuck in Love, has hit pay dirt with his second film, this year’s critical and commercial success The Fault in Our Stars. With a screenplay by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber (500 Days of Summer) from John Green’s novel, the film follows the short but intense romance between a seventeen-year-old girl on oxygen and an eighteen-year-old boy with one of his legs amputated below the knee, who meet at a cancer support group. Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort, who played sister and brother in Divergent, are the young lovers here. Nat Wolff, who was equally superb in Stuck in Love, plays their friend who lost one eye to cancer and now must have his other eye removed. Despite the film’s harsh narrative it never becomes maudlin, nor does it take the opposite approach and veer into sentimentality. It is against all expectations an extremely comforting film, a compelling alternative to the constant barrage of effects-laden films that dominate most of today’s films about young people.

The heart of the film is a “make a wish” trip taken by the young lovers and her mother (a marvelous Laura Dern) to Amsterdam. The purpose of their trip is to meet their favorite author, an American expatriate, played by Willem Dafoe, who turns out to be a jerk. The highlight of the trip turns out to be a visit to the Anne Frank House in which she, struggling with her oxygen supply, and he, dragging his prosthetic leg, climb all the way to Anne’s room in the attic where they have their first kiss. The performances of the two leads, at once wide-eyed innocents and realistic young adults, are among the best the year has to offer.

The Blu-ray edition provides both the theatrical version and an extended version which incorporates scenes that were cut from the release version due to length.

This week’s other major DVD release, Godzilla, is a more typical modern box office hit, a summer blockbuster from a known source, in this case a movie monster that has been terrorizing the world since 1954.

The original Japanese Godzilla was first shown in the U.S.in 1956 as Godzilla: King of the Monsters with inserted footage involving Raymond Burr as a trapped American reporter in Tokyo. Various sequels ensued. A big budget 1998 version, directed by Roland Emmerich, once again called Godzilla, in which New York, rather than Tokyo, was destroyed, was a commercial hit but a critical dud. The new film, which was better received by the critics, sees destruction across the Pacific, but the brunt of it is reserved for San Francisco.

The first part of the film takes place fifteen years before the film’s main narrative in which the monster’s first rumblings are passed off as an earthquake to the unsuspecting public. Bryan Cranston and Juliette Binoche star as husband and wife scientists in this sequence in which Cranston watches helplessly as Binoche dies. Cranston is himself one of the first to die in the present re-awakening of the monster as the narrative shifts to his son, played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson.

The film’s best sequences are those involving human inter-action but those scenes take a back seat to special effects for most of the film’s more than two hour running time. Cranston is superb in the film’s opening sequences, but Taylor-Johnson is rather bland as his son and the rest of the cast, including Elizabeth Olsen as Taylor-Johnson’s wife and Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins as scientists, are given little to do.

Godzilla is available in 3D Blu-ray, standard Blu-ray and standard DVD editions.

Kino Lorber has released Roger Corman’s Avalanche on Blu-ray.

The legendary producer, who is still churning out films at the age of 88, had one of his biggest box-office hits with the 1978 disaster film, his entré into the genre that earlier in the decade had produced such hits as The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno. The film, directed by TV veteran Corey Allen, is a highly watchable, if not too enthralling popcorn flick, starring Rock Hudson as the owner of a new Colorado ski resort, Mia Farrow as his estranged wife, and Robert Forster as a sort of combination ranger-environmentalist-photographer.

The Blu-ray’s extras include on-screen interviews with Corman and Forster. Corman reveals an amusing anecdote about the film’s fake snow used to augment the real snow on the ground during the blizzard sequence. Forster doesn’t remember much about the making of the film except to say that Hudson was nice to everyone and Farrow was nice, too, although she spent most of her time with her kids. He does recall, however, working with assistant director Lewis Teague who gave him the lead in one of his biggest hit films, 1980’s Alligator.

Warner Bros. has done an extraordinary job of restoring Blake Edwards’ 1965 film, The Great Race, to its original glory on Blu-ray.

The film has never looked this good. Its Oscar winning special effects, which were a marvel of their time, still look terrific. The Oscar-nominated Cinematography, Editing, Sound and Original Song (“The Sweetheart Tree”) hold up exceptionally well. Despite all this, however, the film, which was inspired by a real life New York-to-Paris automobile race in 1908, never soars the way it should.

Tony Curtis is fine as the film’s stalwart hero, but Natalie Wood seems like a fish out of water as a fiery suffragette and although Jack Lemmon, as the film’s villain, and Peter Falk as his henchman have some amusing moments, their comic shenanigans tend to overwhelm the film. Lemmon’s various disguises are exhausting. At two hours and forty minutes, the film is way too long.

This week’s new releases include the Blu-ray upgrades of Elmer Gantry and The Innocents.