Dead or Alive: Final

Freely referencing from anime to Huxley's "Brave New World", from "Blade Runner" to Jean-Luc Godard, director Takashi Miike ("Audition", "Ichi the Killer") crafts a spectacular conclusion to his wildly successful series. In Yokohama, AD 2346, a simmering multiethnic melting pot ruled by flamboyantly cruel dictator Woo threatens to boil over. Woo's distopian vision of a city where procreation is forbidden is desperately resisted by an underworld alliance of crooks and rebels, but brutally enforced by super-cop Honda (Riki Takeuchi). When the uneasy rebels capture Honda's son, the only thing standing between them and Honda's implacable wrath is Ryo (Sho Aikawa), an android killing machine with his own deadly agenda. Extravagantly laced with plenty of dynamic, bone-crunching mayhem and a rogues' gallery of endearingly bizarre characters, "DOA: Final" is Miike's lush valentine to Japanese "V Films", the no-holds-barred, direct-to-video crime films where both Miike and his "Dead or Alive" series got their start. A uniquely inventive, slyly post-modern cinematic comfit all its own, "DOA: Final" brings the series to an end with an aberrant exuberance that surpasses the first two "Dead or Alive" films while it "tosses around some intriguing questions about the difference between human and android life." (The New York Times).