Veronica Mars (now available on demand)

[VERONICA MARS is now available on demand.]

Review by Bob Ignizio

I've never seen the Veronica Mars TV show. Whether that makes me more or less qualified to review its feature length film spin-off, also called VERONICA MARS, depends on your point of view. If you're a fan wondering how it compares to the show or whether the characters feel true to how they've been depicted in the past and so on, look elsewhere. All I can tell you is how VERONICA plays as a film strictly on its own terms.That, and it's kind of cool that this movie was funded by fans using Kickstarter. It is to date the most successful Kickstarter campaign for a movie, meeting its goal of two million dollars in less than 10 hours, and going on to raise just shy of six million dollars total. 

Frozen

Review by Pete Roche

The characters and settings in Walt Disney’s new FROZEN look like they exist in the same world as those in TANGLED. 

Maybe they do.

Where TANGLED re-imagined the Brothers Grimms’ hair-challenged Rapunzel for modern audiences, FROZEN borrows from an 1845 Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale, working a similarly charming magic on the big-screen (and employing another one-word adjective for a title that has a better ring than its original “Snow Queen”).  The animation styles applied to the cartoon constituents of chilly Arendale so closely resemble those used for Rapunzel and Flynn Rider that the medieval men and women (and animals) from both films could be considered computer-generated cousins. 

But this time out, kiddies get to meet not just one new Disney Princess, but two.

Hit & Run

Review by Matt Finley

Dax Shepard really likes fast cars. He likes talking about fast cars, driving fast cars, and he loves filming himself talking about fast cars while driving them. Whether these pre-occupations warrant a feature-length action comedy I guess depends on how much you, the viewer, like watching Dax Shepard doing these things.

HIT & RUN, which Shepard wrote himself and co-directed with David Palmer (with whom he worked on 2010’s BROTHER JUSTICE), is a strange movie. I won’t say it’s quite the cinematic equivalent of someone waving at their mom from a merry-go-round… but it’s close. Shepard performed most of his own driving stunts, cast a crew of Hollywood buds plus his spouse – the button-cute Kristen Bell - and uses the narrative as much to grocery list and riff through his own comedic and cultural fixations as he does to tell an engaging filmic story.