New Japanese film reviews appear every last Friday of the month.

Showa Kayo Daizenshu ****

Based on a novel by Ryu Murakami (who wrote Audition), this is a delightful black comedy. The title is stolen from a bland NHK music show, "Collection of popular songs from the Showa Era," but this mordant film uses oldies as a soundtrack to a battle between stab-happy youths and vengeful old bags. When one of the youths is rebuffed by an older woman, he slits her throat. The woman's friends, a group of divorcees all named Midori, take the war to the boys. An escalating war of attrition begins with knives, guns, bazookas and nuclear weapons! Finely judged performances by a large cast, with standout appearances from Ryuhei Matsuda as a disturbed boy and Saya Suzuki as a still-sexy vamp, make this a surprisingly entertaining film. Director Tetsuo Shinohara tackles the material with 1980s style simplicity - and the result is great fun.

Sky High *

Ryuhei Kitamura's latest film, and like ALIVE and AZUMI another adaptation from a manga. Maybe that's the problem, because this is yet another portentous drama in metallic interiors with interminable bubbling techno soundtrack. Brutally murdered bride Yumiko Shaku is given a chance to go back to earth to find her killer, except this time she's one of several victims of a serial killer with a taste for the theatrical. Takao Osawa steals the show as the evil genetic scientist collecting beating hearts to summon the devil, and Maiko Yamada impresses as his ruthless heart-surgeon. The ever game Shaku is wasted throughout the film as an insubstantial doe-eyed dreamer, however. It's only in the final showdown that she reveals her Princess-Blade prowess with a sword. Like most of Kitamura's films, unfortunately there's no momentum to the story - it bores where it should enthrall.

g@me ***

New thriller by Satoshi Isaka, who started his career with the interesting psychological thrillers Focus and Frame. In this one, a high-flying advertising executive Naohito Fujiki is persuaded to help stage the fake kidnapping of Yukie Nakama, the beautiful daughter of his rich client, beer-baron Ryo Ishibashi. All goes well, until they make off with the ransom money, and the daughter disappears. Then Fujiki watches with horror as the missing daughter turns up murdered - and worse, she looks nothing like the girl he helped swindle her dad! Good performances all around (except for the always crap Izamu) keep this on track to the very end, although the plot is a little thin in the details of the robbery, the twists from halfway are interesting and unexpected.

Dead End Run ***

Sogo Ishii's latest is another short 60-minute experiment in extremely loud guitar rock and breathless, shaky-cam imagery, just like Electric Dragon 80,000V. It has three stories about three pairs of protagonists on the run - each of whom hits a brick wall or dead end alley. In number one, a man is pursued by a female robot killer with a penchant for musical numbers. In story two (the best episode), Masatoshi Nagase is pursued to the same cul-de-sac by hired killer Robert Harris. In the final story, Tadanobu Asano climbs up on to a roof to escape the police and takes hostage a young girl - who was up there to commit suicide. Excellent hard guitar soundtrack, jittery visuals, and unexpected denouement. Recommended.

Kwaidan: Eternal Love **

Another version of the popular Kwaidan horror kabuki tale about the disfigured woman who haunts her lover. Theater director Yukio Ninagawa helms this very stagey version of the recent novel which reimagines the tale as a love story. Excellent performances by Toshiaki Karasawa as the humble ronin samurai Iyemon, by Koyuki (the actress chosen by Tom Cruise for his love interest in Last Samurai) as the disfigured but proud Iwa, and by Shiina Kippei as the jealous samurai lord Ito intent on driving them apart. Ninagawa seems more at home with this eminently theatrical material than he did with his last feature "Blue Flame", and the good acting carries the story over its rather wobbly middle - where Ito's deception could be exposed by a single word between the two lovers.

First Love, Last Love *

After the sexy noir thriller Utsutsu, director Hisashi Toma must have been looking for a holiday in Shanghai. How else to explain his choice of this insipid drama as his next feature? A thoroughly obnoxious Japanese executive (played by Japan's worst actor, the always twitching, sighing and wincing Atsuro Watabe) goes to Shanghai and meets two beautiful sisters. Xu Jinglei plays a lonely hotel receptionist, and Dong Jie is her effervescent little sister, and wouldn't you know, they both fall for the sullen, rude jerk. Just when you think this listless drama hits bottom, as Watabe mopes around to the sisters' house for dinner, it sinks even further with the revelation that one of the sisters has a terminal disease! Guess who gets the First Love, and who the Last?

Out of This World *

Junji Sakamoto's latest film is obviously a labor of love: a sprawling, multi-character piece about Japanese jazz musicians playing for the US troops immediately after WW2. Even with young heartthrobs Masato Hagiwara and Joe Odagiri as the cool cats, this one is going to have a hard time finding an audience. The soundtrack is full of swing classics that never swing - the only time the music takes off is when the angry GI (Shea Whigham) challenges the band's saxophonist to a cutting session. Sakamoto's script attempts to show the entire social history of Japan between 1947 and 1950 - hookers, blackmarketeers, reds, amputees, orphans and drug-addicted jazzmen all - but like Sho Aikawa's awful English, it seems slightly of whack. Did black GIs really dance the shuffle to Japanese jazz bands - in all-male clubs? Did the US Army announce troop deployments at the Enlisted Men's Club - while the band played Danny Boy? File under historical curios.