N eo Sora is a Japanese film-maker who directed Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus, a documentary about his father , the renowned composer. Now he has made his feature debut with this complex, beguiling and often brilliant movie, co-produced by Anthony Chen; it manages to be part futurist satire, part coming-of-age dramedy, part high school dystopia. It combines the spirit of John Hughes’s The Breakfast Club with Lindsay Anderson’s If.… and there might even be a trace memory of Paul Schrader’s Mishima, only without the seppuku.

In a high school in Kobe in the future, students are oppressed by the reactionary xenophobia of their elders; periodic earthquake warnings, and actual earthquakes themselves, create a widespread air of suppressed panic which the authorities believe justifies a perpetual cla

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