We know Yamakawa from his eccentric short films (see April 5). Like them, The New Morning of Billy the Kid is an inventive pastiche of Occident and incident in a new Japan, where John Ford's Monument Valley is a painted backcloth. Billy the Kid takes a job at the Schlachtenhaus (Slaughterhouse) saloon, a kind of last stop for civilization where his workmates are all culture heroes ranging from famous samurai to a dishwasher whose moniker is Marx Engels. The film has a femme fatale named Sharlotte Rampling, a girl band called Zelda, punks arrayed with Snoopy accessories, a cataclysmic shootout, and startling moments of poetry. "Yamakawa's wonderful film is not a rock'n'roll fantasy but a thoughtful comedy about movies, music, information technology and the need to leave the past behind. The saloon is an arena of dreams where characters, images and situations from popular culture are transmitted into something entirely new. If you've ever imagined elegiac farce or melodramatic social satire, here they are." (Tony Rayns)