Charles Theatre

Baltimore QFest, one of two LGBT film festival set for 2012, will unspool June 21-24 at various locations throughout the city. Organizers plan to show some 60 feature films, documentaries and shorts during the four-day festival. Where the films will be shown has yet to be determined, said Raymond Murray, the event's artistic director. Venues under consideration include the Charles Theatre , the Maryland Institute College of Art , the Creative Alliance at the Patterson and the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Community Center of Baltimore and Central Maryland.

It used to be that the Maryland Film Festival was just a cool neighborhood event for Courtney Knipp - a bunch of obscure movies being shown just up the street from her home in Mount Vernon. Not anymore, not with thousands of film fans massing in and around the Charles Theatre , watching movies - 127 this year - - and comparing notes with hundreds of filmmakers from all over the world. This tiny corner of the Station North Arts District becomes the center of the film universe for one weekend every May. And that is so cool by Knipp.

The most towering figure in Hollywood history wore ill-fitting clothes, including shoes several sizes too big, and never said a word. Beginning Saturday, he'll be spending a year at Baltimore's Charles Theatre . Charlie Chaplin, a British expatriate who became the first Hollywood superstar and made a series of films — as writer, director and star — still as astonishingly delightful today as they were in the 1920s, is the subject of...

Every spring, the Maryland Film Festival takes over Station North, drawing thousands to the Charles Theatre and nearby blocks. Since 2008, a smaller, more experimental video exhibit has run the same weekend inside the Metro Gallery - across the street from the Charles. Called Videopolis, it showcases features which don't meet traditional formats, according to 35-year-old curator Guy Werner. We caught up with Werner, who is married to Metro Gallery founder Sarah M. Werner, and talked about RVs and old TVs. Worst pet peeve?

New this week, exclusively at the Charles Theatre: seats!Seats you can actually sit in! That caress your rear end and take the ache out of your backside. That do not jab, fold, spindle or mutilate you or collapse under your weight and deposit you on the floor. Yes: seats without a sense of humor. Just plain old . . . chairs!The legendary rep and art house on Charles Street is in the process of refurbishing its admittedly tacky and frequently broken 486 seats with new upper and lower cushions covered with a "virtually indestructible" blue weave called "Marquessa."

The planned expansion of the Charles Theatre cleared its last financial hurdle yesterday after the city agreed to give a $79,000 grant toward construction of the movie house that will grow from one screen to five.The Board of Estimates unanimously approved the grant in hopes that the expanded theater will be an economic boon to surrounding neighborhoods that are beset with empty properties and crime."This will really help that block that is struggling now," saidBeverly Fuller, executive director of the Midtown Community Benefits District, a neighborhood organization that includes the theater.

He was recently rated the No. 1 star in Hollywood history. He's probably had more books written about him than any other American movie star. He made snarls and lisps seem downright sexy.He's even been immortalized on a postage stamp.Which helps explains why tomorrow, Humphrey Bogart takes up a two-month stay at the Charles Theatre.Beginning with a showing of "The Petrified Forest" tomorrow and Monday, the Charles will be screening Bogart films every Saturday morning and Monday evening through Oct. 27. For fans, the 11-film festival offers a rare chance to see Bogie on the big screen, to see a larger-than-life character in the sort of larger-than-life setting he belongs.

When up-and-coming Hollywood heartthrob Aaron Stanford makes it big, some Baltimore movie lovers can say they knew him when. Aaron was in town recently at a Charles Theatre preview screening of Tadpole for the benefit of the Maryland Film Festival. In the movie, the 20-something actor plays a 15-year-old interested in older women Sigourney Weaver and Bebe Neuwirth. Film Fest programming administrator Dan Krovich says, not only was the movie good, but so were some of the questions the audience of 200 asked Aaron and the film's director Gary Winnick, who was also at the screening.

For a brief moment this summer, Baltimore filmgoers may have thought they were seeing things. The Charles Theatre, the venerable art house that had recently added four screens, was playing such big studio movies as "Summer of Sam," "South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut" and "Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me."Meanwhile, the 17-screen General Cinema megaplex in Owings Mills was showing "Limbo," the latest low-budget feature from independent filmmaker John Sayles.Was there something wrong with this picture?

Last weekend's convocation of Cinema Sundays at the Charles Theatre served as an impromptu memorial service for the late George Udel, who was remembered not only as an avid film aficionado, but also as a bon vivant, generous soul and man of creative interpretations of Baltimore traffic laws.Before a screening of the Civil War drama "Ride With the Devil," friends and Cinema Sundays members shared memories of Udel, who died last week at age 69. A more formal memorial service at the Charles is being planned for the spring.

The 14 t h Maryland Film Festival proved the most popular yet, with ticket sales up from 5 to 10 percent daily and advance sales up more than 25 percent, according to festival officials. The four-day festival, which ran through Sunday at the Charles Theatre , MICA's Brown Center and the Wind-Up Space, included 22 sold-out screenings, MFF director Jed Dietz said. People had to be turned away from the John Waters pick, "Wanda," the set-in-Baltimore "LUV" and the closing night local premiere of Todd Solondz's "Dark Horse," among other films.

Station North was abuzz with thousands of cinema addicts and more casual moviegoers this past weekend, for the 14th annual Maryland Film Festival. The Festival brought some 100 films and an even higher number of filmmakers to the neighborhood. As always, the Charles Theatre was the hub for the action, which included favorites such as a screening with devious filmmaker John Waters, and newer fare such as a disturbing flick starring a 12-year-old. Festival director Jed Dietz, who's seen attendance at his annual event grow every year, said he was surprised by the adventurousness of the crowd.

John Waters opened his audience's eyes to a kind of film experience they'd probably never had before. Another writer-director raised in Maryland scared a late-night crowd silly. A movie about a sexual assault left some viewers heading for the exits early. Such were the pains and pleasures of the first two days of this weekend's 14th Maryland Film Festival. Running through Sunday night in and around the Charles Theatre , the festival showcases more than 100 films, including documentaries, short subjects and feature-length narratives.

Five short narrative films, on themes ranging from a modern-day urban cowboy to a scamming extraterrestrial, kicked off the 14th annual Maryland Film Festival at MICA's Brown Center Thursday night. Maryland's festival remains the only one of its kind to devote its opening night to short films — works the evening's host, salon.com film critic Andrew O'Hehir, praised as a way for filmmakers to hone their craft. The evening's fare kicked off with MFF alum Christina Choe's "I am John Wayne," a cryptic modern take on the cowboy tradition, complete with a horse, a laconic hero and a two-timing woman, all set against a Coney Island backdrop.

The most towering figure in Hollywood history wore ill-fitting clothes, including shoes several sizes too big, and never said a word. Beginning Saturday, he'll be spending a year at Baltimore's Charles Theatre . Charlie Chaplin, a British expatriate who became the first Hollywood superstar and made a series of films — as writer, director and star — still as astonishingly delightful today as they were in the 1920s, is the subject of...

Baltimore QFest, one of two LGBT film festival set for 2012, will unspool June 21-24 at various locations throughout the city. Organizers plan to show some 60 feature films, documentaries and shorts during the four-day festival. Where the films will be shown has yet to be determined, said Raymond Murray, the event's artistic director. Venues under consideration include the Charles Theatre , the Maryland Institute College of Art , the Creative Alliance at the Patterson and the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Community Center of Baltimore and Central Maryland.

It used to be that the Maryland Film Festival was just a cool neighborhood event for Courtney Knipp - a bunch of obscure movies being shown just up the street from her home in Mount Vernon. Not anymore, not with thousands of film fans massing in and around the Charles Theatre , watching movies - 127 this year - - and comparing notes with hundreds of filmmakers from all over the world. This tiny corner of the Station North Arts District becomes the center of the film universe for one weekend every May. And that is so cool by Knipp.

Albert Maysles has never liked the term "cinema verite," even though he is credited with helping to invent it.Maysles, with his late brother David, used hand-held cameras, synchronous sound and no narration to create an intimate, urgent, occasionally frenetic style of filmmaking that came to be called "cinema verite" -- loosely translated as the cinema of truth. But Maysles has always preferred the term "direct cinema" to describe his work."People talk of the near-death experience as being so revelatory," said Albert Maysles from his Manhattan office during a phone conversation.

When Kevin Clash was a boy in Baltimore County, he'd watch TV mere inches from the screen and wish he could walk right into "Sesame Street. " It didn't take him long to get there. At 15, the kid from Turners Station became the regular puppeteer on a WMAR kids show. At 19, he performed as Cookie Monster in the Sesame Street float at the 1979 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, and that night met his hero, Muppet creator Jim Henson. "Sesame Street" hired Clash in his early 20s. Before he turned 25, he took a gravel-throated red fur-ball and imbued him with a loving nature, a piping voice and a rapscallion innocence.

"Witch's Brew," the latest effort from horrific Baltimore director Chris LaMartina, gets its world premiere at the Charles Theatre Wednesday night. The movie, filmed in and around Baltimore over the past two years, offers the twisted tale of a couple local brewmasters who run afoul of a witch. The results are predictably horrifying — especially to those unlucky enough to sample their "Slacker Lager. " As the movie's tagline so succinctly puts it, "Liver damage will be the LEAST of your problems.