Preceded by shorts: One Step Beyond (10 mins) and The Cat Often Comes Back in the Morning (Neko wa yoku asa kaettekure) (18 mins), both by Naoto Yamakawa. Yamakawa (born in 1967) is without a doubt Japan's hottest young director, a Bertolucci for the nineties whose ears ring with garbage-band rock rather than Verdi arias. He's best known so far for his awesomely original short Attack on a Bakery and feature The New Morning of Billy the Kid, but this program of his latest work gives a good idea of his range, skill and promise. So What is a feature for the youth market: the story of a small-town, high school garage band, based on a comic strip by Katsuhiro Otomo (creator of the legendary Akira). It's the most unpretentious and unpatronizing film about Japanese kids in years, and it's shot like a dream-even the splices have style! One Step Beyond and The Cat Often Comes Back in the Morning are episodes from the portmanteau feature Fantastic Collection, and both splash around in the off-the-wall humor that's becoming Yamakawa's trademark. The first offers the year's most spectacular sequence shot; the second is Chandler writ small more wittily than anything in the line since Gumshoe. No, Jean-Luc, not a child of Marx and Coca-Cola. More like a resident of Alphaville with a taste for ice cream and tracking shots. Tony Rayns