Ballerina

Skippable, and better than its reputation. Nothing in Chapter 4 depends on it and nobody introduced here appears there, so a reader working through the main line loses nothing structural by leaving it out.

Watch it between Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 if you watch it at all, which is where the chronological toggle on this site puts it. It is set during the window when Wick is excommunicado and it uses that window: he turns up briefly, as a problem rather than a guest appearance, and the Ruska Roma ballet school that Chapter 3 visited for one scene is the institutional backdrop for the whole film. Watched after Chapter 4, whose ending is about as final as this series gets, it plays as a flashback nobody asked for.

Ana de Armas is why it works as well as it does. Eve Macarro is smaller and weaker than almost everyone she fights, and the choreography is built around that rather than ignoring it. She wins by improvising with kitchen equipment, a belt of grenades and eventually a flamethrower, and the long sequence in an Alpine village where two people fight at close range with flamethrowers is the most purely enjoyable thing the series has done since the catacombs.

The production history is visible in the seams. It was shot in 2022, held for three years and extensively reshot with Stahelski overseeing the new action, and two registers sit inside it without quite meeting: a sober revenge story, and a set of spectacular sequences bolted on afterwards. It is also Lance Reddick's last appearance as Charon, filmed before his death in 2023, and that scene is handled with more care than the film around it manages.