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

Install **

In this first feature by TV variety-show director K Kataoka, cute little elf Aya Ueto (the murderous ninja from "Azumi") plays a 17-year-old schoolgirl who plays hooky from school and becomes a hermit. She's eventually enticed out by a precocious 10-year-old boy, played by precocious kid actor Ryunosuke Kamiki, who turns her into an internet erotic chat queen. Despite the director's claims, this is limp TV drama fare that never gets down to the nitty-gritty of exploitative internet porn. Aya remains an innocent elf, the erotic chat stays peculiarly chaste, and the precocious boy stays preternaturally obnoxious. Worst of all, the film has an insistent, irritating soundtrack. It's as inane as the preprogrammed chirpy muzak that greets you when you accidentally arrive at a home-made website of a Morning Musume fan.

Synchronicity ****

The latest film by Macoto Tezka (son of Osamu "Atom Boy" Tezuka) is his first mainstream effort and looks very cool indeed. It's the tale of a fashion model newbie Reika Hashimoto who holes up in the funky Kabukicho pad of a surly punkette Kaori Kawamura. Her life is turned upside down when she witnesses a gruesome murder in the love hotel next door and becomes convinced someone is trying to kill her roommate. The plot is thickened with all manner of red herrings - the suspicious photographer Masanobu Ando, a shady ex-cop, grostesquely staged murders, a dash of voodoo, a dead twin, etc. Tezka keeps the whole thing moving with almost Lynchian skill, especially in the beautifully set and atmospherically lighted interiors. This is a fun and intriguing ride - even if the plot dissolves into potboiler cliches.

Patchigi! ****

Kazuyuki Izutsu's follow up to last year's hit "Geroppa!" is a tale of love, race, free radicals and frequent punch-ups. In late '60s Kyoto, Shun Shioya plays a shy teenager with moptop dreams who falls in love with cutey Erika Sawajiri, well aware that she's Korean but unaware that her older brother is Sosuke Takaoka, leader of the young hoodlums who run the town. Between rather preachy lessons on radical politics and the Korean immigrant experience in Japan, Izutsu successfully strings together several storylines with a full cast of characters. "Patchigi" is Korean for "break through," but also used in fights to mean "headbutt," and there's plenty of headbreaking along the way. This is Izutsu's most entertaining film yet.

DP *

In this sci-fi actioner by Seiji Chiba, who did the awful "Ganryujima," a gang of youths wakes up in a forest robbed of all memory, and suddenly comes under attack by sword-wielding, black trenchcoat-wearing relentless assassins. Instead of realizing they are in "Versus meets Cube," bickering youths Kento Honda, Hassei Takano and Yoko Fujita fight among themselves until more assassins appear - this time with guns, then machineguns and finally choppers with missiles! Writer-director Chiba is hoist on his own petard: amnesiac heroes offer no characters to develop, no pasts to explore; encroaching walls and ruthless terminators allow no survivors. By the time the youths discover they have been tattooed with the letters DP, the audience has long ago figured out what the acronym means and lost all interest in the youths' miserable fates.

Tokyo Noir *** (DVD)

An omnibus of three short films by directors Masato Ishioka and Naoto Kumazawa, this is an illuminating depiction of modern women's attitudes to the sex industry. In the first and best episode, Takami Yoshimoto plays an OL with a repressed libido who finds liberation when she tries turning tricks. In part two, Aimi Nakamura plays a popular sex worker in a Tokyo brothel who is surprised by a visit from her ex boyfriend. In part three, a lonely woman strikes up a friendship with Aya Seki, a blogger who writes up her sexual experiences on the web. Three modern erotic tales shot on DV that provide an insight into the dreams and frustrations of modern women. Considering the low-budget, these are surprisingly well done and watchable.