Photo © Starz Entertainment/Lionsgate Films
Ana de Armas - From the World of John Wick: Ballerina
Ana de Armas in From the World of John Wick: Ballerina (2025)
Ballerina
(In Theaters June 6)
The popular “John Wick” franchise spins off a storyline featuring a female assassin. She is ballerina Eve Macarro (Ana de Armas), intent upon acquiring professional skills necessary to avenge her father’s death. Lance Reddick returns as the concierge of the Continental Hotel, in the actor’s final performance prior to his death. Ian McShane reprises his role as the Continental Hotel’s proprietor. Norman Reedus plays a mysterious man, while Keanu Reeves makes a brief appearance. Gabriel Byrne portrays the antagonist, hell bent on killing Eve. When audiences were unimpressed by director Len Wiseman’s test screening, producer Chad Stahelski stepped in to shoot additional sequences and wound up reshooting most of the film. Ian McShane said he was “furious” that his fight scene with Eve was cut in Stahelski’s edit. I’m with Ian since more McShane equals more fun. (Lisa Miller)
Dark City: Limited Edition
(Arrow 4K Ultra HD)
John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) awakens in a hotel bathtub surrounded by blood, including a dead woman whose body was carved in spirals. He tries on unfamiliar clothing, fingers an unknown key, finds a postcard in his (?) suitcase from a place that brings only a flicker of memory. Murdoch has no idea who he is or why he is in this rundown hotel room.
Dark City was brilliantly conceived by director Alex Projas (The Crow). The setting is a noir metropolis where the cars and the radios, the clothes, are all circa 1948. The city is a dimly lit labyrinth of long dark corridoes and dead-end streets. As in many classic thrillers from the ‘40s, the protagonist is pursued by the police for a crime he didn’t commit—and by other forces as well. In Dark City, those others are “men” in black, cousins of Count Orlok with strange powers. Are they the city’s hidden masters?
Projas drew from the noir lexicon, complete with the amnesia, the good “bad girl” on the street, the hardboiled police detective just doing his job, the chase down a spiral stairway into an Edward Hopper nightmare … The mysterious villains wear black leather gloves like the killers in Italian giallo. Jennifer Connelly plays Murdoch’s wife, a nightclub singer; William Hurt plays the police inspector; and Kiefer Sutherland plays Dr. Schreber, a psychiatrist who fears to tell all he knows. He runs experiments with rats in a maze, a metaphor for the film’s idea that we are trapped in a false world, governed by dark entities, a gnostic idea revisited a year later by the Wachowskis. However, with its many cineaste references, Dark City is more a treat for film buffs than The Matrix.
Dark City’s Limited Edition release features the director’s cut and a good deal of audio commentary along with a booklet that puts the film in context. (David Luhrssen)
The Ritual
(In Theaters Jun 6)
Both shocking and engaging, William Friedkin’s 1973 The Exorcist inspired numerous imitators. Despite this one being drawn from an actual 1928 case, it adds zilch to the exorcism-film canon. Director David Midell works with Al Pacino as Priest Theophilus Riesinger, and Dan Stevens as local cleric Father Joseph Steiger. Both actors give watchable performances but are weighed down by a cliche script and shoddy production. Together, the priests spent months attempting to exorcise demons possessing Emma Schmidt (Ashley Greene). Afterwards, each recounted events that were recorded by others, leading us to hope for insights that never arrive. With Schmidt’s possession depicted in run-of-the-mill fashion, we wonder whether the noise, rather than their fear, drove nuns from the Franciscan Sisters Convent where the exorcism occurred. (Lisa Miller)
