For the final production in her company's 10th-anniversary season, New Ground Theatre Artistic Director Chris Jansen chose to direct a rather epic piece: the debuting period drama Under the Radar, which features numerous plotlines and changes of locale, and concerns our area's gay scene in the late 1970s, with particular attention paid to the relationship of one long-term gay couple.

Based on that description, it sounds as though Jansen is tackling a Quad Cities-based, pre-AIDS version of Tony Kushner's Angels in America. Yet when, with a good-natured laugh, she says of the mammoth undertaking, "Some idiot wrote 11 characters into it," know that Jansen isn't being derogatory. At least, not toward anyone but herself.

Playwright Thornton Wilder's Our Town is one of the few preachy plays that I don't mind for its sermonizing. With his blatant, nearly Buddhist statements and themes about living, really living, each and every moment of life, Wilder is unapologetic about the points he wants to drive home. And perhaps because his ideas are so universally acceptable, it's easy to accept Wilder's moralizing. It also helps that the delivery of his messages is so emotionally poignant, as was effectively displayed during Friday night's Our Town performance at Augustana College.

WATER FOR ELEPHANTS

After his where's-my-paycheck? turn in The Green Hornet, I was mildly concerned that, following his Oscar-winning Inglourious Basterds portrayal, Christoph Waltz might be resigned to a career of forever playing Euro-trashy über-villains in Hollywood action dreck. With director Francis Lawrence's Water for Elephants, though - a Depression-era romance based on Sara Gruen's beloved novel - my fears have proved unfounded. As the egomaniacal, possibly sociopathic owner and ringleader of a second-tier traveling circus, enraged by the blossoming affections between his star-performer wife (Reese Witherspoon) and the troupe's young veterinarian (Robert Pattinson), Waltz is every bit as mesmerizing - charming, unpredictable, terrifying - as he was in Quentin Tarantino's World War II opus. Yet fantastic though he is, Waltz's talents here aren't a shock. The bigger surprise is that the movie itself is so bloody marvelous.

SCREAM 4

Directed, as all of the franchise's outings have been, by Wes Craven, and written by Kevin Williamson, Scream 4 is a sequel, a reboot, and a big middle finger to reboots, all in one bloody, meta, mostly tedious package. It opens beautifully and features a bunch of (mostly verbal) horror-comedy pleasures, yet its overall effect is wearying; Craven and Williamson are so focused on deconstructing the genre - the Scream series in particular - for a media-soaked, hipper-than-thou young audience that even its "surprises" are in quotation marks. Watching Scream 4 is like watching a movie with its commentary track running before you've had a chance to experience the film without it.