Veronica Mars

According to lore, Liberace used to greet the tourists who'd come by bus to gawk at his bejeweled home with the line, "I hope you like it. After all, you paid for it!" Not everyone has to like Rob Thomas's Veronica Mars, the feature-length incarnation of his much-loved television series, which ran from 2004 to 2007. But the fans who helped finance the movie, via a ferociously successful Kickstarter campaign, have every reason to like it: It's been crafted affectionately for them, bringing back nearly every original cast member -- chief among them Kristen Bell and Enrico Colantoni — and treating them like human beings who have gone on living while we weren't looking. When we last saw Bell's Veronica Mars, she was still a teenage detective in the small, moneyed Southern California town of Neptune. Now she's a bona fide adult just out of law school and eager to start a new career in New York. Ten years after high school, she has no intention of going back for the planned reunion, even though it would give her a chance to visit her father, Keith Mars (Colantoni). But when Veronica learns that Logan (Jason Dohring), her on-again, off-again ex, is a suspect in the death of his rock-star girlfriend, she senses something isn’t right and books a plane ticket home. Anyone unfamiliar with the show might get tangled up in the threads that Thomas and his co-writer, Diane Ruggiero, spin out. But as with all great TV shows, on Veronica Mars, the really interesting things were all happening in the margins, and here, Thomas, Ruggiero, and the cast make the most of every available corner.