The Merry Christmas catalogue of atrocities finally becomes numbing, even ludicrous.

From Oshima's later career... most notable is this bilingual, end-of-WWII tearjerker about forgiveness and understanding between cultures, which could have been dubbed The Man Who Fell to Java.

For all the praise heaped upon Oshima's admittedly ambitious film about East-West relations in the microcosm of a Japanese PoW camp during World War II, it's far less satisfactory than most of his earlier work.

This World War II drama ignores battlefield skirmishes for culture clashes, and in doing so, it carves out its own niche as one of the most atypical POW films ever made.