
Ballerina (2025)
There’s a particular genre of moviegoing now, call it Franchise Bereavement, where, sitting eyes glazed before the flickering remnants of a once-vital series, you feel less the thrill of pulp than the mournful exhumation of directorial intention, a séance with the ghost of what you thought the movies could be. Ballerina, advertised as “From the World of John Wick,” is less a spin-off than a séance, summoning the spirit of Keanu’s elegiac carnage into a low-lit mausoleum of hurried excess and retrofitted backstory. If its audience’s expectations are sufficiently modest, second-tier shootouts for the matinee crowd, wickless but still faintly smoldering, perhaps it delivers. But in the clear light, you see the grout, and the cracks: this is franchise hand-me-down, draped hastily around Ana de Armas like a borrowed cloak she’s expected to dignify.