Attention all action film fans! Run, don’t walk, to the nearest movie theater to see From the World of John Wick: Ballerina. Then set aside some time a day or two later to go see it again. This is one for the ages.

Ana de Armas, who’s been a star waiting for the right vehicle ever since Knives Out brought her to widespread attention in 2019, has now got a film franchise worthy of her. The fascination of Ballerina is established early on — how can a small, slight, delicate-looking young woman such as de Armas’s character, Eve Macarro, trained in ballet, become an unbeatable killing machine à la John Wick, so she can avenge her murdered parents?

Though it should be noted that ballet is an insanely athletic discipline that inures practitioners to pain. Ballerina demonstrates this in a scene of bleeding toes in red-soaked toe shoes that ends with the implacable Director (Anjelica Huston) telling Eve, “Go tend to your wounds before you get sepsis and we have to cut off your feet.”