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

Sekai no Chushin ni, Ai wo Sakebu *

Takao Osawa and Kou Shibasaki are the credited stars in this adaptation of a best-selling romance with the unwieldy title of "Crying out for Love in the Center of the World," but the movie belongs to the two youngsters who play the ill-fated high-schoolers - Mirai Moriyama (a young dancer making a very impressive lead debut here) and Masami Nagasawa (another very natural, poised debut performance). Osawa and Shibasaki mope gloomily from one location to the next so that the director can flashback from their glum mugs to bright and glowing teenagers as they fall in love one idyllic past summer in rural Japan. Isao Yukisada directs with little sense of tempo or dynamics, so much so that he completely ruins the much-anticipated lachrymal floodgate finale. My three hankies stayed dry throughout.

69 **

Adapted from the autobiographical novel by Ryu Murakami, this is a hippy-era coming-of-age story that wants to be a raucous, salacious comedy. The movie is filled with period charms, nostalgic props and flower-power music (cue up that Cream song again!), and the young cast has a ball staging happenings, joining commie organizations, quoting Rimbaud and Godard, and generally pretending to be rural teens pretending to be the radical generation. Director Lee Sangil tries for a comic book tempo, setting up gags and wild moments only to cut to a freeze-frame punchline - completely destroying the energy. The all-star cast is certainly up for it, but the director's refusal to shape the narrative into anything more than a series of quirky, jerky moments, makes 69 a peculiarly haphazard entertainment. Like the recent "1980," it's great on period mayhem, but low on narrative interest.

Mindgame ****

From the cult manga by Robin Nishi, whizz-kid director Masaaki Yuasa (he did the "Crayon Shinchan"movie!) leaps off into a trippy, psychedelic adventure that gleefully mixes Osaka manzai, yakuza hitmen, silly love, a short history of 20th century Japan and Jonah in the belly of the whale. A feckless youth and his high-school sweetheart Myon get involved in a lethal confrontation with an oddball soccer-mad yakuza in an Osaka pub, and somehow end up dancing acrobatic musical numbers in the belly of a whale with an old geezer! This is crammed with visual and aural playfulness, and there's nothing really to compare it to but "Fantasia" meets "Tamala 2010." Yuasa rejoices in modern anime techniques, filling the screen with 2D and 3D wackiness, mixing in comicbook styles and storyboards, then inserting photographic touches, and in the second half, going for full-on hallucinatory, funny-mushroom-inspired musical sequences. Against a hip bossa nova meets club soundtrack by Seiichi Yamamoto, this is delirious and delightful - and probably disastrous at the box office.

Blue Spring (DVD) ****

Another portrait of disaffected youth from director Toshiaki Toyoda after his pulverizing Pornostar, a sort of modern-day "Taxi Driver" in Shibuya. Based on a manga by Taiyo Matsumoto, the film stars charismatic pretty boy Ryuhei Matsuda as the effortlessly cool leader of a high-school gang. But when he suddenly grows bored of dangerous gang games (such as seeing who can lean out farthest from the school roof), and starts learning gardening from the school janitor, his best friend and second-in-command Hirofumi Arai goes haywire. As real yakuzas loll outside the schoolgates waiting for recruits (a neat touch), Arai cranks up the violence to try to win back Matsuda - with tragic results. A chilling schoolyard parable of pent-up menace and gratuitous violence, accompanied by Toyoda's usual good taste in soundtrack music.