REVIEWED - WHEN THE LAST SWORD IS DRAWN (MIBU GISHI DEN): In a convoluted framing device, When the Last Sword is Drawn is set in 1899 in Tokyo, on a winter's night as a couple of married doctors prepare to move to Manchuria.

While his wife continues packing, Dr Chaiki Ono (Takehiro Murata) is drinking and staring at an old photograph when a man arrives with his ailing grandson on his back. The visitor is Hajime Saito (Koichi Sato), an ageing former samurai who recognises the man in the photograph as Kanichiro Yoshimura (Kiichi Naki), "the man I hated once in the mad days before the Shogun fell."

This coincidence prompts the first in a series of extended flashbacks to the dying days of the Shogunate in 1863, when Yoshimura was an outstanding swordsman. His prowess is demonstrated early on when, with one clean stroke, he brusquely beheads a man who is shirking from committing hara-kiri as ordered. Yoshimura proves willing to take on the tasks despised by his fellow samurai because, we learn, he is concerned with saving money to support the family he left behind in a distant northern province.

The film covers similar ground to - and pales in comparison with - Yoji Yamada's recent The Twilight Samurai, a graceful, humanist character study of a lonely, low-level samurai and widower in 1860s Japan. Though thoughtful and quite impressively staged, the equally melancholy When the Last Sword is Drawn is let down by generally pedestrian pacing, some hammy performances and a disappointingly sentimental resolution.