In the evening of his career, veteran director Kinji Fukasaku has composed an extraordinary futuristic nightmare, in which his expertise in yakuza-style violence is coloured by sadness and a crazed tenderness. The film is based on a bestselling Japanese novel, but was inspired by personal trauma: in 1945, caught with teenage classmates in artillery fire, Fukasaku hid underneath dead bodies and, along with other school-age survivors, was forced to bury severed limbs. The director transposes this image of horror and obedience into an imagined future in which law and order is imposed by the annual removal of a random group of teenagers to a remote island, where they are forced to kill each other. The lone survivor is the winner.

Like Norman Jewison's Rollerball, which is currently in production, and Daniel Minahan's underrated Series 7: The Contenders, Battle Royale makes traditional sci-fi sport with the idea of society breaking down, and the subsequent imposition of terror and tyranny. But Fukasaku finds a distinctly Japanese metaphor for an imperial destiny coming to its end: a fiercely proud, martial civilisation aware of its own mortality. Like Shinji Aoyama and Takashi Miike, he is exploring a very Japanese malaise.

Takeshi Kitano is excellent as the embittered schoolmaster who presides over this grotesque game. As the film progresses, the violence and suspense take second place to the intensity of adolescent crushes and unspoken yearnings that emerge, purified, under these horrific laboratory conditions. Fukasaku cannot maintain the exhilarating rush of the first 30 minutes, but it is an outstanding work nevertheless.

At the Cameo tonight and the UGC on Thursday. Box office: 0131-623 8030.