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

Casshern ***

Whiz-kid director Kazuaki Kiriya, who did all those spectacular music videos for Hikaru Utada before marrying her, certainly conjures up some great images in his first feature film. He creates numerous new worlds, from grandly baroque interiors to cities and plains that are giant battlefields, with nonstop filters, tints, digitization effects and CG backgrounds. It looks more like anime than live-action film (the "Avalon" effect). Yusuke Iseya stars as Casshern, the dead soldier son of a scientist who is reanimated to battle the revolting spare-part clone armies of Toshiaki Karasawa. Considering they are acting against blue-screen effects, all the actors turn in impassioned performances, and for a while it looks as if Kiriya might be able to fashion a truly mythic fantasy actioner. Alas, as the two sides summon robot armies to battle, the film descends to the level of an arcade game. Mitsuhiro Oikawa, Mayumi Sada and Kumiko Aso all turn in memorable performances, Hikki adds a sweet swansong to the final credits, and Kiriya's choice of soundtrack music is always dramatic. If only the story weren't so '80s, and the major action sequences so cheesy CG.

My Lover is a Sniper *

A spinoff from the TV series of the same name, this feature-length version stars comedian and Jackie Chan-wannabe Teruyoshi Uchimura as a polite Chinese student who moonlights as a ruthless triad assassin (Tokyo governor Ishihara's nightmare). This time, the sniper is called back to Japan to help save the entire Japanese nation from an evil organization "1211" that is assassinating random citizens. Uchimura teams up with his ex-lover Miki Mizuno, the cop who caught him last time, to track down the evil doers - played with gum-chewing insouciance (and little else in the way of characterization) by bleach-blond Shido Nakamura and the evilly smirking Hiroshi Abe. Uchimura and Mizuno outdo each other in the earnest acting stakes, even as the ludicrous plot twists and turns down ever more silly avenues. The finale, as snipers snipe on other snipers from building tops and helicopters, takes the movie back down to TV-drama levels. Why is it these professional assassins still can't hit a wall from five meters?

Appleseed *

A SF animation based on an '80s Shirow Masamune manga that has become a cult classic, "Appleseed" is being heralded as the future of animation. A fearless woman fighter Deunan, a foxy little bioroid Hitomi, and Deunan's old flame Briareos (now a cyborg with pink eyes and big ears, kind of like Gundam the Rabbit) unite to save the world of Utopia from evil army types plotting a coup d'etat while a crew of wise old-timers float around on gyro bean-bags. Much heralded for its use of 2D and 3D animation, the film never gels into a whole. Director Shinji Aramaki mixes fluid motion-capture action with funky backgrounds and pristine hyper-real cityscapes to great effect, but the characters, human and cyborg alike, are all rendered with Noh-like puppet masks topped off by ridiculous playdoh hair. Just like last month's "Innocence," the stirring action sequences are separated by long, turgid explanations about the coexistence of humans with robots and totally dumb sequences where the audience is supposed to shed a tear for decommissioned bioroids.

Hotel Venus *

This has to be the most pretentious, unbearable film in a long while. In a hotel in Vladivostok, a group of Japanese actors shoot a film in Korean for no other reason than the fact that Smapster Tsuyoshi Kusanagi has been learning a bit of Korean for a TV show. Hirota Takahashi directs this extended music video, and while it is stylish in a bleached out color stock that looks like tinted black-and-white, the nonstop histrionics of the cast acting in a language they don't understand soon becomes ridiculous. Kusanagi plays the hotel boy snooping around his long-term guests, a lush doctor and his wife, a hitman and his girlfriend, a drag queen and a mysterious Korean guy and his withdrawn pre-teen partner. With little story, Takahashi fills in time by having the actors communicate by tap dancing (are they from planet Zog or something?) and repeatedly cueing up "Someone to Watch Over Me" (didn't the budget extend to licensing a few more tunes?).

Chugoku no Chojin ****

This month's recommended DVD is an aberration in the Takashi Miike lineup - a slice of Asian magic realism. If you only know Miike from his grossout fests "Ichi the Killer," "Visitor Q" and "Audition," then this will be a surprise or a disappointment (depending on the viewer's penchant for fish-hooks and piano wire). In the "Bird People of China," an uptight businessman Masahiro Motoki and a traumatized yakuza Renji Ishibashi travel through the outer reaches of the Chinese Yunnan mountains in search of jade. Along the way, they lose touch with modern life (shown neatly as their modes of transport devolve from airplane to train to jalopy to turtle-driven raft) and finally end up in a remote village where a blue-eyed Chinese girl sings Scottish folk songs and teaches the local children to fly on canvas wings. Constantly surprising and entertaining, Miike goes all new-agey and healing!