Movie Review Cold Wallet

Cold Wallet 

Directed by Cutter Hodierne 

Written by Cutter Hodierne, John Hibey 

Starring Raul Castillo, Josh Brener, Melonie Diaz, Tony Cavalero

Release Date February 28th, 2025 

Published February 24th, 2025 

One thing I cannot do is find any sympathy for people who bring about their own bad circumstances. For instance, I have no time for people who die climbing Mount Everest. If you’d like to not die on the side of a frozen mountain, choose not to go. Pretty simple. I feel the same way about people who lose money in crypto scams. If you want to avoid losing money in Bitcoin or whatever, don’t get into Bitcoin or Crypto. I’ve managed to not get into crypto for its entire existence, thus I have not lost money on it. Pretty simple. 

I mention this because the movie Cold Wallet was up against a lot to get me to care about people who lost money in a cryptocurrency scam. The movie pulls off quite a trick because it never bothers to ask you to like its main characters. By the time you reach the end of the movie and the main character is met with a moral crisis, it’s surprisingly compelling, even if you have no idea what the character is about to do via some sort of internet exchange of currency.

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media, linked here. 

Movie Review Adult Best Friends

Adult Best Friends

Directed by Delaney Buffett

Written by Delaney Buffett, Katie Corwin 

Starring Delaney Buffett, Katie Corwin, Mason Gooding 

Release Date February 28th, 2025 

Published February 26th, 2025 

Adult Best Friends stars Delaney Buffett and Katie Corwin as Delaney and Katie, childhood best friends who grew up together and are beginning to grow apart. While Katie is embracing the conventions of adulthood, including a long term relationship with John (Mason Gooding), Katie remains in young adulthood, drinking and partying and begging Katie to join her. As Katie would rather stay home with John and Katie wants only to go out and party, the two struggle to maintain their lifelong bond. 

The plot kicks in when John proposes to Katie and she accepts. Now, Katie must find a way to tell her best friend that she’s getting married while worrying that Delaney’s disdain for John will cause an irreparable rift in their friendship. In order to break it to Delaney gently, Katie plans a beach vacation for them, returning to a beachside town where they’d vacationed and partied more than a few times. Delaney thinks it will be a weekend of drinking and partying, while Katie hopes they can find quiet moments for a heart to heart conversation.

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media, linked here. 

Movie Review The Rule of Jenny Pen

The Rule of Jenny Pen

Directed by James Ashcroft 

Written by Eli Kent, James Ashcroft 

Starring Geoffrey Rush, John Lithgow 

Release Date March 7th, 2025 

Published March 6th, 2025 

The Rule of Jenny Pen stars Geoffrey Rush as Stefan Mortenson, a judge who suffers a stroke in the midst of the sentencing for a murder trial. Waking up in a nursing home, Judge Mortenson finds his mind and body assaulted on all sides but is what happening real or only in his mind? Leading the assault is Dave Crealy (John Lithgow), a bully who has lived in this nursing home since childhood. Crealy wears a puppet on his arm named Jenny Pen that he uses as part of his torture. 

Throughout the run time of this remarkably unique horror movie, the scares come as much from Lithgow’s unhinged performance as from the ravages of age. If you have a deep seated fear of infirmity and the loss of faculties due to age, The Rule of Jenny Pen will be leaning on that particular nerve throughout the entire film. The nursing home setting is not a new one for a horror movie but co-writer and director James Ashcroft uses the setting remarkably well in crafting scenes of creeping terror.

Find my full length review at Horror.Media, linked here. 

Movie Review Mickey 17

Mickey 17 

Directed by Bong Joon Ho

Written by Bong Joon Ho

Starring Robert Pattinson, Naomie Ackie, Mark Ruffalo, Toni Collette, Steven Yeun 

Release Date March 7th, 2025 

Published March 7th, 2025 

Mickey 17 is a dark sci-fi comedy from the brilliantly unique mind of writer-director Bong Joon Ho. The film covers topics that Bong Joon Ho has addressed in his previous films, sympathetically examining the lives of those at the bottom of the economic ladder, rot and corruption in the moneyed class, and the little things that make life matter. In the case of Mickey 17, the question boils down to whether you believe death gives life meaning. Does living life to the fullest mean nothing when you know you’re not actually going to die? 

Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) has a tendency to trust the wrong people. A lovely guy, Mickey first placed his faith in Timo (Steven Yeun), and paid the price when Timo lost all of their money to a gangster with a fetish for watching people die. Narrowly avoiding the gangster, Mickey and Timo sign up for a dangerous job off of planet Earth. A failed politician, Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife, Yifa (Toni Collette), are leading an expedition to colonize an alien planet and they need a crew.

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media linked here. 

Classic Movie Review Muriel's Wedding

Muriel’s Wedding 

Directed by P.J Hogan 

Written by P.J Hogan 

Starring Toni Collette, Rachel Griffiths

Release Date March 10th, 1995 

Published March 11th, 2025

Muriel’s Wedding stars Toni Collette in a debut performance that blows the doors off. It can come as no surprise that Collette has gone on to be one of our most reliable, beloved, and extraordinary leading ladies after she absolutely smashed this comic debut. Colette’s Muriel is a complicated mess of a character, a tangle of depression, bad decisions, low self esteem, and an agonizing longing for a different life. When she finally sparks the courage to search for a new life, the journey is incredibly funny, rewarding and heartbreaking. And all of this is playing through Collette’s extraordinary performance as framed by P.J Hogan’s deft direction.

Muriel is a mousy, wedding loving, dreamer. Her life centers on two things, loving the music of Abba, her pop culture comfort food, and dreaming about getting married. Muriel may, in fact, prefer the wedding to the actual marriage and companionship. Wedding dresses, bouquets, and the pageantry of a wedding procession are her true passion, even as she rarely outright says this. The film implies Muriel’s obsession while Muriel herself just tries to remain unnoticed. This is easy among her family where she’s one of several adult children with no job and few prospects.

Click here for my full length review at Geeks.Media.

Classic Movie Review Rear Window

Rear Window 

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock 

Written by John Michael Hayes

Starring Jimmy Stewart, Grace Kelly, Raymond Burr

Released September 1st, 1954

Published March 12th, 2025 

Alfred Hitchcock’s genius, for me, boils down to two elements: juxtaposition and perversion. Hitch takes a thing or a person associated with a specific characteristic and places that person or thing in a different context, one opposite to how we perceive it. The Birds (1963) is a great example. Before The Birds, no one associated birds with anything remotely dangerous. Hitchcock takes Birds and turns them into horror movie villains, convincing us through the use of storytelling and the tools of cinema that even the most innocuous animal can be used as a symbol of a battle between man and nature. 

He enjoys this kind of juxtaposition in his actors as well. Take, for instance, Cary Grant in North by Northwest. Here, Hitchcock takes this bastion of handsomeness, charm, and good manners and repeatedly renders him helpless, hapless, and narrowly avoiding dangerous schemes not by his unending charm or good looks but by sheer chance and good luck. This flies in the face of our collective, cultural memory of Cary Grant as a debonair, accented charmer, a man constantly one step ahead of anyone he’s in a scene with. He is certainly the hero of North by Northwest but he does not drive the action, action happens to him. A leading man is supposed to be the catalyst of a story, Hitchcock takes the ultimate leading man of his time and robs him of his agency, forcing him to be subject to a plot rather than driving it. It's a juxtaposition of our expectations, of Grant's persona, and of the concept a leading man in a movie.

Click here for my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review Ice Princess

Ice Princess 

Directed by Tim Fywell

Written by Hadley Davis 

Starring Michelle Trachtenberg, Joan Cusack, Kim Cattrall, Hayden Panettiere 

Release Date March 18th, 2005 

Published March 13th, 2025

If not for the far too young passing of actress Michelle Trachtenberg, the 20th anniversary  of the movie Ice Princess likely would have passed unnoticed. Though this is a quite good for what it is sports movie, it's not exactly a top of mid movie for anyone outside a few nostalgic millennials with failed dreams of winning Olympic gold in Figure Skating. In 2005 and thereafter, more than a few young girls lived vicariously through Trachtenberg's overachieving academic with Harvard in her future who develops a sudden interest in figure skating through the use of math. 

Casey (Trachtenberg) has been on her way to Harvard University from the womb. Her mother, Joan (Joan Cusack), isn't a maniac intent on forcing her daughter to go to Harvard, just very supportive of the idea and proud of her accomplishments. Thus, it is to Joan's dismay that Casey decides to get back into figure skating. Joan sees it as a distraction from her stated academic goals. Casey meanwhile, posits figure skating as a physics experiment, developing an algorithm that not only helps her become an incredible skater in mere weeks, it also helps the other girls building their figure skating dreams including Gen (Hayden Panettiere), an early rival and soon friend of Casey. 

Through Gen, Casey meets Gen's brother, Teddy (Trevor Blumas), and begins a tentative romance. Add this to Casey's summer job, and you an understand why Joan starts freaking out over Casey having little time to focus on her studies. A boyfriend, a job, figure skating practice and competitions pile up alongside Casey's Harvard project and everything seems to suffer, save for figure skating. Indeed, Casey has gotten so good that when it appears she may qualify for an advanced tournament ahead of Gen, Gen's mother and their coach, Tina (Kim Cattrall), sabotages Casey to assure that Gen gets to move on to the big tournament. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media linked here.