Imax

If you haven't been able to get "Satisfaction" yet, don't despair. The Maryland Science Center is extending its IMAX Theater run of "Rolling Stones at the Max" until Labor Day.The 89 minute film, which had been scheduled to close Memorial Day, documents the last leg of the Stones' "Steel Wheels/Urban Jungle" tour.The film will be shown Thursday through Sunday at 8 p.m., through Sept. 7. Beginning July 3, the IMAX will also feature late ++ shows on Friday and Saturday at 10:30 p.m. Tickets are $13. The Science Center is located at 601 Light St. Call (410)

Regal Cinemas will open a theater at Waugh Chapel Towne Centre, a planned mixed-use development in Gambrills in West Anne Arundel County, project developer Greenberg Gibbons said Monday. The theater will offer digital projection and will be the first IMAX cinema in the area. The 52,000-square-foot theater will join anchors Wegmans, Target, Dick's Sporting Goods and Petco in a 1.2 million-square-foot center with 650,000 square feet of shops, 125,000 square feet of offices and 380 apartments.

The Maryland Science Center's "After Hours at IMAX" changes its bill this weekend, and offers live entertainment at tonight's showings.Two new films open: "Water and Man," which shows humankind's dependence on Earth's most bountiful element, and "Fires of Kuwait," which documents the oil fire inferno left behind by the Persian Gulf war.The "After Hours" program is usually shown at 7:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays. Admission is $6. Tonight's show begins at 7:15, with a performance by the Foxheads, an a cappella singing group, which will also perform at a break between the two film showings.

'Winter Seafari' in Virginia Beach includes aquarium fun What's the deal: The Virginia Beach Winter Seafari packages include two nights' accommodations at a participating hotel, tickets to the Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center and IMAX theater, daily breakfast (available at participating hotels) and a choice of one premium Virginia Aquarium experience — either a Winter Wildlife Boat Trip; Sea Turtles: Behind the Scenes; or Harbor Seals: Behind the Scenes. The packages are available through March and start at $83 per person.

A geography quiz:What land mass is, on average, three times higher than any other continent? Has air drier than the Sahara desert? Sees just one sunrise a year?Some have likened it to the moon, and NASA has even used its terrain to test equipment destined for a landing on Mars.The new film opening today in the big-screen IMAX theater of the Maryland Science Center provides the answer: "Antarctica.""Antarctica reminds us once again we have scarcely begun to understand our planet," intones the narrator midway through the film.

YOU'D RATHER be sailing, as the familiar bumper sticker goes. But in the winter doldrums, "Race the Wind," the new film premiering tomorrow at the Maryland Science Center's big-screen IMAX theater, is a pretty good surrogate."

Imax Corp. may be staring at a bigger mountain of problems than the climbers in Everest, the hit documentary shown in its gargantuan-screen theaters. Troubles for the company started this year with the disclosure of an informal inquiry by the Securities and Exchange Commission into whether revenue was improperly booked. That news caused Imax's stock to tumble sharply. Nine lawsuits have been filed by shareholders. And the company has had trouble finding a buyer at a time when it needs to expand and upgrade to digital technology.

If you haven't been able to get "Satisfaction" yet, don't despair. The Maryland Science Center is extending its IMAX Theater run of "Rolling Stones at the Max" until Labor Day.The 89-minute film had been scheduled to close here Memorial Day.The film will be shown Thursday through Sunday nights at 8 p.m. through Sept. 7. Beginning July 3, the IMAX will also feature late-night shows on Friday and Saturday nights at 10:30 p.m. Tickets are $13; they are available Monday through Thursday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Friday-Sunday 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. at the Science Center at 601 Light St. or through Ticketmaster by calling 410-481-SEAT.

From the rocking impact of the Rolling Stones' "At the Max," which ended a 10-month run last weekend, the Maryland Science Center's "After Hours at IMAX" program becomes significantly quieter and more contemplative this weekend.The double-feature films "The First Emperor of China" and "Seasons" take viewers, respectively, on an opulent trip back into time and through a dreamy nature landscape. The bill opens tonight and runs at 7:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays; admission is $5.*"First Emperor," completed in 1989 as a co-production ofChina's National Film Board/ Xi'an Film Studio and the Canadian Museum of Civilization, diverges sharply from most films made to exploit the large-format IMAX process.

In case you had trouble getting good seats for the recent eruptions in Japan and the Philippines, the Maryland Science Center's new IMAX film, "Ring of Fire," will give you a dazzlingly vivid look at some of the world's angriest volcanoes.The 50-minute movie, open to the public beginning Saturday, starts in Chile and traces the string of volcanoes that circles the edge of the Pacific, north to Alaska and back south through Japan to Indonesia.Geologists have dubbed this volcanic loop the "Ring of Fire" because three-quarters of the world's 600 active volcanoes are here.

"Hubble 3D," a celebration of the orbiting space telescope and the NASA crew that gave it new life last year, provides a glimpse of how star systems looked a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. It reveals the borders of the visible universe. It drinks in the spectacle of celestial bodies born in fiery pillars of clouds. The content is scientific. The imagery gets biblical. In fact, after Baltimore-based astronaut John Grunsfeld witnessed a positive power check on a Hubble camera he'd installed, he said, "Let there be light."

The Maryland Science Center wants Baltimore moviegoers to know that sensory-immersion filmmaking didn't start with "Avatar." For more than 20 years, the five-story screen of the center's IMAX theater has featured thrills every bit as spine-tingling as seeing 10-foot-tall blue aliens ride flying dragons through floating mountains. "Avatar" has been great propaganda for IMAX theaters: They've accounted for a whopping 12 percent of that blockbuster's domestic gross. Starting Tuesday , the center hopes to attract fans of all kinds - not only fantasy or sci-fi freaks, or lovers of artificial spectacle - to an IMAX film festival.

See more, hear more, feel more!" goes the IMAX motto, and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which opened Wednesday at the Maryland Science Center, fulfills that promise on every score. For once with a live-action blockbuster, the super-sharp imagery and engulfing sound of this deluxe form of presentation (short for MAXIMUM IMAGE, but with equally enhanced audio) proves just as effective at immersing viewers in an experience as at popping their eyes with spectacle. The Half-Blood Prince does both.

FILM 'Half-Blood Prince' in IMAX: Harry Potter may be head boy at the box office, but he couldn't quite get Transformers out of those IMAX theaters. But this week the robots move out, and the Hogwarts crew moves in. Like last year's The Dark Knight, the opening sequence was actually shot with IMAX in mind. Opens Wednesday at local theaters, including the Science Center. CONCERT Neko Case : This alt-country singer is riding high. She's always been a favorite of critics, but now she's seeing real commercial success.

'Watchmen' is No. 1 at weekend box office Watchmen clocked in with $55.7 million in ticket sales to claim the top spot at the box office, making director Zack Snyder's comic book adaptation about a team of twisted superheros the biggest opening of 2009. Still, it was not quite as big as the $70 million take of Snyder's 300 in 2007. Dan Fellman, head of distribution for Watchmen studio Warner Bros., said it was unfair to compare the two films. Many Watchmen enthusiasts raced to IMAX theaters to see Dr. Manhattan and company on the bigger screens.

With digital projection, IMAX screens and movies in 3-D all coming to a theater near you, 2009 could go down as the year that high-tech became the indisputably dominant force in American movie theaters. No less an industry force than DreamWorks Animation head Jeffrey Katzenberg, long the most vocal proponent of high-tech wizardry in moviemaking, is predicting that all movies may one day be shot in 3-D, and he's already decreed that all DreamWorks' animated films be shot using the extra-dimensional process.

A California company called Knowledge Adventure Inc. has done a strange and wonderful thing with the IMAX movie called "The Discoverers," now playing on a five-story-high screen at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry.They have reduced the movie from the giant screen at the Omnimax Theater to a 4.5-inch-by-5.5-inch screen on your computer monitor. In the process, they have made the big-screen movie even bigger.Of course, anybody who ever has had the pleasure of watching an IMAX movie (and who hasn't?

The best moment in "Search for the Great Sharks," the new feature at the Maryland Science Center's IMAX theater, is oddly quiet.We are aboard a research vessel floating on a calm sea, as the sky presses down and ocean birds sail overhead. It's a scene of pure, heightened anticipation that stretches out for a long, long moment until . . .Wham! The jaws of a great white shark break the surface and attack a bait fish floating from a surface buoy.That transition from serenity to sudden violence symbolizes why sharks so terrify us, of course -- and why they fascinate us, too."