J. EDGAR

Pretty much everything that's bothersome about director Clint Eastwood's biographical drama J. Edgar is only bothersome for the movie's first half hour. That may sound like a lot of time spent bothered. But the film does run 135 minutes, even its weakest moments are by no means awful, and in the end, it emerges as a really fine work with a really fine central performance. So as a nod to J. Edgar (the movie, not the man), let's just get it out of the way and address its failings at the start.

TOWER HEIST

A lot of people make a lot of fun of director Brett Ratner, partly because his résumé - which includes not one, not two, but three Rush Hour movies - makes it so darned easy to.

Described by the Chicago Sun-Times as "simultaneously hilarious and touching," the road-trip comedy Leaving Iowa is the final presentation in the Playcrafters Barn Theatre's 2011 season. Leaving Iowa is also the first presentation in Black Hawk College's 2011-12 theatre season, but don't chalk that up to either coincidence or some sort of Moline-based rivalry; the productions are actually one and the same.

IN TIME

Set in either the distant future or some Bizarro World version of the present, Andrew Niccol's sci-fi thriller In Time imagines an Earth in which time is literally our universal currency; an eight-hour work shift can add a few days to your life span, but a trip to the grocery store will cost you two weeks. (A slowly ticking, neon-green clock embedded in your forearm tells you just how much time you have left to spend.) It's also an Earth in which humans have been genetically engineered to stop aging at 25, and are then allowed one year more before their bodies shut down completely ... unless, of course, they have the proper means, or the proper lack of morals, to buy or steal as much extra time as they want.