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

Shoronagashi ***

This nostalgic family drama set in 1960s Nagasaki harks back to another era of movie making - handsomely mounted, filled with period and location color, and well acted by a strong cast of stars. Ostensibly about the maturing of a fatherless boy Asahi Uchida, the film is actually a prayer to women - from the radiant Reiko Takashima and Keiko Matsuzaka as his mom and aunt, to cute Miki Sakai as his faithful girlfriend. Director Mitsutoshi Tanaka helms this tearjerker with a very sure hand, and builds the complex story of family and friends in Nagasaki and Kamakura with telling scenes at a brisk tempo. The story reaches a moving finale at the spectacular Shoronagashi (Parade of Souls) festival in Nagasaki, where the son discovers the identity of his real mother while launching a lantern boat to her memory.

Drugstore Girl *

In this outrageous so-called comedy, a gang of grubby old gropers gives up fondling foreigners in the local pink-salon and takes up lacrosse to be near the permanently arched eyebrows of Rena Tanaka. Directed by Katsuhide Motoki, and written by Japan's hit-screenwriter Kankuro Kudo (who wrote Go and Ping Pong), it starts off wobbly with some cringe-inducing hamming by Tanaka. A crew of veteran stage hams (Akira Emoto, Yuji Miyake, Masato Ibu and Naomasa Musaka) attempts to outdo her and each other with painful mugging and histrionics. Reeking of dog ends and booze, the wheezing old pervs make fools of themselves on the lacrosse field, until, in the film's comic highlight, one of them drops dead of a brain seizure! Laugh, I nearly started.

Atashinchi **

The first anime feature developed from the very popular manga books and TV series by manga artist Eiko Hara. The story is very similar to the recent Hollywood movie Freaky Friday, as the thimble-shaped mom and daughter bang heads during an electric storm and change personalities. Essentially a modern Sazae san, the family is extremely traditional - the daughter may want pierced ears and a trip to Universal Theme Park in Osaka, but dad still expects the women in the house to rub ointment on his ass and get him beer from the fridge. The story picks up halfway through as the family meets a man in a similar situation - Tanaka swapped personalities with a pigeon during an electric storm at Osaka racetrack. The bird-brain sequence is quite surreal.

Hard Luck Hero (DVD) *

Sabu's latest film is a straight-to-DVD quickie starring raggedy boy-band V6. Incredibly, this good idea for a music video stretched to an unbearable 90 minutes had its premiere at the Tokyo Film Festival, which just shows how the festival is declining. A reductio ad absurdum of SABU's usual scenario, this has not one guy running from the yakuza - but six! The V6 boys play six innocent bystanders at a fixed boxing match who end up chased by ugly men in loud suits and sneers. That's it for plot - the rest of the film is images of legs and wheels on tarmac, intercut with closeups of the immaculately coiffed boys screaming. A terrifying picture of the future of Japanese film. Soon all movies will be like this: extended music videos produced by talent agencies and record labels aimed squarely at preteen DVD buyers.

Jisatsu Manual (DVD) **

Another of those blink-and-you'll-miss-it theatrical features that turns up on DVD within weeks of its cinema release, Suicide Manual is a strange one. Part low-key horror movie, part documentary on the spate of recent group suicides and the websites that link lonely suicidal youths together. TV reporters investigating a group suicide find a DVD in a black jacket, the infamous Suicide Manual. On it, a mysterious beauty lists the pros and cons of various suicide methods - while in the background, willing victims top themselves with chilling theatricality. The manual's highlights are the "ancient Indian suicide machines," baroque contraptions that behead or dice the wearer at the touch of a button. Thin plot, desultory acting, cheap production values, all par for the course in recent Japanese horror movies.

Shudan Satsujin Club (DVD) *

Promising premise for a horror movie goes all wrong in this incredibly cheap looking video production by Hitoshi Ishikawa. A teenage hooker accidentally kills her customer, a pathetic geek called Takezo (Ken'ichi Endo). She and four other Shibuya girlfriends bury the body, but zombie Takezo keeps coming back to murder them. There is one imaginative killing (a girl is killed in a washing machine, her rubbery legs spinning endlessly in the rinse cycle), and the striking, Miike-regular Endo has fun playing the mild-mannered loser who apologizes as he kills. Big Slaughter Club comes a cropper, however, with its endless cheap video effects, lack of any real script, and the hopeless acting by the cast of teen models. Fans will be pleased to know that there are already three sequels to this one!

Hitoban Bakuto (video) ****

This month's recommended classic video is the first of the Red Peony (1968) series, the stylish Taisho-period gangster films that made Junko Fuji a huge star. Kosaku Yamashita directs this tale of revenge with a poetic eye, and lingers lovingly on the porcelain skin of Fuji, while bringing in some psychedelic flower imagery at key moments. Fuji plays the Red Peony, a wandering gambler on a quest to find her father's killer. On the road, she runs into ronin yakuza Ken Takakura, who looks terrific too in an immaculately starched yukata. Within minutes, she slips her kimono down to reveal the large crimson peony tattooed on her shoulder - so he can tend to a sword-cut there. The scene smolders with eroticism. In the finale, they team up to take righteous vengeance on the local cowardly, treacherous yakuza boss. A samurai film in 1920s garb, with kimonoed and tattooed avengers cutting swathes through evil. Cool.