Film

In recent years, arthouse cinema has developed its own version of the studio or network "high concept" - an idea for a movie or TV show that can be summarized in a phrase or sentence, such as "MTV cops" for Miami Vice. For Memento, it was "widower with short-term memory loss seeks wife's murderer." For Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, it was "couple learns about love as they erase each other from their memories." The problem with these films is that all their fun and invention go into the concept.

LA JOLLA, CALIF. -- As Ricki Lake can testify, once you join John Waters' wonderfully warped artistic family, you're part of it forever. And so - 19 years after she starred as tubby teen Tracy Turnblad in the movie Hairspray, and 17 years after portraying the pregnant, potty-mouthed Pepper in the movie Cry-Baby - Lake was an honored guest as the world premiere of Cry-Baby's stage adaptation was held here Sunday night. You can get a daytime talk show and become a TV staple. But then, one day, inevitably, you will find yourself hanging out with Waters in Southern California, noshing on grilled veggies and baklava, and telling secrets to an easily startled stranger.

Paris, j'etaime, an intriguing little film in which 21 directors offer romantic cinematic snippets set in the city on the Seine, opens today at the Charles Theatre. What a great idea for a film, giving people who love a city the chance to commit that passion to film. Which led me to wonder, why shouldn't Baltimore be afforded the same sort of treatment? A bunch of creative people love this city very, very much. What if a dozen of the city's biggest boosters were offered the chance to direct 10-minute cinematic snapshots of Baltimore as they see it?

A selection of modern African films will be screening in Baltimore this weekend, as part of the Baltimore Museum of Art's 16th annual "African Spirit Series," a celebration of African culture. Tomorrow, the offerings from the African Film Traveling Series include South Africa's Dumisani Phakathi's Don't F*** With Me I Have 51 Brothers and Sisters (noon), chronicling the director's search for his extended family; You, Waguih (1:50 p.m.), French director Namir Abdel Messeeh's look at his Egyptian father's abuse at the hands of Egyptian authorities; A Child's Love Story (2:30 p.m.)

A 25-film retrospective of the films of the great Alfred Hitchcock kicks off this weekend at the Charles, 1711 N. Charles St. First up is 1935's The 39 Steps, starring Robert Donat as a Canadian visitor to London who gets caught up in an international spy ring (after the woman he had tried to help is found murdered in his apartment). With Madeleine Carroll (as his unwilling partner), Peggy Ashcroft and John Laurie. Showtime is noon tomorrow, with encore screenings set for 7 p.m. Monday and 9 p.m. Thursday.

Columbia native Edward Norton is bowing out of the Washington-set political thriller State of Play, his publicist confirmed yesterday. Norton's departure follows that of Brad Pitt's, who left the film late last month, just as it was about to start production in Los Angeles (Washington filming was to start next month). Russell Crowe was recast in the Pitt role, as a newspaper reporter covering a homicide investigation that points back to his former employer - the ambitious young politician Norton was to play.

Everyone is entitled to his opinion about a movie, but wouldn't it be nice if he saw the movie first? With the Internet giving an instant worldwide audience to every would-be movie critic, it's apparent many aren't even abiding by that one seemingly obvious rule. Sometimes the results are just silly: When word leaked out last year than actress Anne Hathaway appeared nude in the film Havoc, "reviews" started appearing on various Web sites -- especially those devoted exclusively to tracking actors' nude scenes -- that couldn't find the proper superlatives to describe how explicit the scenes were.

The 2007 Towson University Student Media Arts Festival, a showcase for student-created films, begins Monday with screenings of documentaries and experimental films, plus those centering on dance, in the auditorium of Van Bokkelen Hall on the TU campus, 8000 York Road. On Thursday, the emphasis will be on TV shows, news, public service announcements and commercials, plus corporate and music videos. More screenings are set for April 27 and April 30, with a reprise showing of the best works set for May 5. All film programs begin at 7 p.m. Admission is free.

Persona, the first of many fruitful collaborations between director Ingmar Bergman and actress Liv Ullmann, is the next scheduled film in the Charles Theatre's 13-week Bergman retrospective. The 1966 film stars Ullmann as a nurse who develops a strong identification with a mute patient. Said Bergman, "I touched wordless secrets that only the cinema can discover." Showtime is noon tomorrow, followed by encores at 7 p.m. Monday and 9 p.m. Thursday. Tickets are $6 tomorrow, $8 other times for the show at 1711 N. Charles St. Information: 410-727-FILM or thecharles.

Movies that reach out and grab you are coming to the Enoch Pratt Free Library this summer, beginning tomorrow with a 2 p.m. screening of the 3-D version of Jack Arnold's 1954 horror classic, Creature From the Black Lagoon. Funny-looking 3-D glasses will be provided. Admission is free. The film will be shown in the Wheeler Auditorium of the central library, 400 Cathedral St. Information: prattlibrary.org/calendar. Baltimore `Pride' "Film Baltimore," the University of Baltimore's salute to movies made in and about Charm City, concludes Thursday with an 8 p.m. screening of Sunu Gonera's Pride (2007)

Respire" is a made-in-Maryland feature centered around a secret formula for prolonging life. It's also a horror movie, so naturally the secret to prolonging life leads to gruesome deaths and mass derangement. The Baltimore area has become a center for modest genre movies that determined filmmakers push over the finish line and often screen for cast and crew at local theaters like the Senator and the Charles before their release on DVD. I usually don't attend these events. But David A. Cross, the producer-director-writer of "Respire," was clever enough to schedule his horror movie's debut close to Halloween.

If moviemaking won't come to Baltimore, Charm City's own budding moviemakers will make it happen, using all the means at their disposal - digital technology, eloquent locations and craft friendships developed in the years when this city had an amazing 2 1/2 film crews at work on movies such as "Liberty Heights" and "Cecil B. Demented," and TV shows such as "Homicide." That's the overriding hope behind the Baltimore-based films in this weekend's Baltimore Women's Film Festival. Elena Moscatt, creator of the Web series "Life After Lisa," stunningly illustrates that audacity of hope as well as persistence and ingenuity.

Sometimes you are in the mood to watch something intellectually engaging, such as the Masterpiece mystery series, "Inspector Lewis." You must pay attention when watching these British mysteries, because for the first half hour, you experience a 1.7-second delay between the British actors talking and your American ears understanding what in the devil they just said. This is because British people speak largely inside the face, whereas Americans project outward, flapping our lips expansively like sheets on a clothesline.

The terror du jour is "Paranormal Activity," but it's following the recipe set out by the made-in-Maryland "Blair Witch Project" a decade ago. It's a haunted-house movie, not a haunted forest film like "Blair Witch." But the catch-as-catch-can style, the mood of growing dread, and the conceit that audiences are seeing footage found after the demise of the characters are straight from the "Blair Witch" game plan. No one recognizes the similarities more acutely than Montgomery County native and Frederick resident Eduardo Sanchez, who co-directed "The Blair Witch Project" (with Daniel Myrick)

FOXBOROUGH, Mass. - -As the undefeated Ravens measure themselves against the New England Patriots today, it's difficult to do the same with their starting quarterbacks. The Patriots' Tom Brady has won three Super Bowls, and the Ravens' Joe Flacco hasn't played three seasons. Flacco prefers casually walking through the front door of Bonefish Grill, and Brady tries to avoid paparazzi when whisking his Brazilian supermodel wife to the trendiest restaurants in Boston. Brady kicks back in limousines, and Flacco turns down the dealership when it wants to pick up his car for an oil change.

Tommy Polley has played in his share of big games at the highest level before millions of viewers, but he was admittedly nervous when he entered the Dunbar High School gymnasium Tuesday before an audience of about 200 current and former students and faculty. This time, Polley, who played six seasons in the NFL, including one with the Ravens, was playing the role of storyteller instead of playmaker. The former football and basketball star at Dunbar in the mid-1990s was on hand for a screening of Poet Pride, a documentary that he co-produced with fellow alums Rob Foster and David Manigault about the school's storied basketball program, which was a national powerhouse in the '80s and '90s.

Reese Witherspoon's kids are at that age - the one where they discover a movie they like and proceed to watch it over and over and over again. Her daughter, Ava, 9, and son, Deacon, 5, don't get bored of their favorites and don't find themselves satisfied with a third viewing. They just get excited to watch it again. So it's no surprise that the Oscar winner, 33, is particularly concerned with the quality of children's entertainment, choosing to work back to back on animated feature films.

The Class ranks with the very best films ever made about teaching, and it's unlike any English or American film about teaching ever made. This film from contemporary master Laurent Cantet (Heading South), about a French grammar instructor teaching a diverse group of 14- and 15-year-olds in a Paris school, depicts a mixture of instinct and process that allows a pedagogue to sustain genuine communication with his students while preserving his own sanity. Jon Voight's Pat Conroy in the great American film Conrack swept up his students with his outsize personality and his poetic relationship to his subject matter.

A documentary about a mad 1960s household, Must Read After My Death, constructed out of tape, Dictaphone recordings and home movies, premieres theatrically today in New York and digitally everywhere via its distributor's Web site, giganticdigital.com. The company charges $2.99 for a three-day "ticket," good for any number of viewings, and promises to stream the film in any quality up to high definition. Viewers will be able to adjust the image according to what looks right for their home screen.

When The New York Times interviewed producer Jerry Bruckheimer about bringing out an upscale consumer farce called Confessions of a Shopaholic during a global economic crisis, he denied that he performed any major last-minute tinkering. Even the shopaholic's father's most relevant line - "if the U.S. economy can be billions of dollars in debt and still survive, so can you" - was part of the script before everyone was talking about a catastrophic recession. Will the plot about a woman disentangling herself from credit cards generate business or deflect it?