Imax

IMAXWhat: "We Are Born of Stars" and "Speed"Where: Maryland Science Center IMAX TheaterWhen: Noon, 2 p.m., 3 p.m., 4 p.m., and 5 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays; 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. Fridays; hourly 11 a.m. through 7 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Beginning June 14, the films will run hourly 11 a.m. through 5 p.m. Monday through Thursday, and hourly 11 a.m. through 7 p.m. Friday through Sunday.Tickets: Included with Science Center admission of $8.50 for adults, $6.50 for children 4-17, senior citizens and military personnel.

From the first liberating flights of humans in gas-bag balloons to the fabulous perspectives of Earth as seen from the space shuttle, the IMAX Theatre at the Maryland Science Center has put together a terrific new weekend double feature.The "After Hours at IMAX" program that opened last night, with 7:30 p.m. showings on Fridays and Saturdays through mid-November, brings back "To Fly" and "Blue Planet."The ethereal "To Fly," last seen in Baltimore in 1987, seems as enchanting today as when it debuted in 1976 as the premiere film of the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington.

Pro basketball hasn't been the same since he left. It has become the province of erratic and overpaid 19-year-olds, spoiled turnover machines who can't shoot, can't play defense, can't get along with teammates and coaches. Or maybe it just seems that way because he's gone, leaving a gap no one could possibly fill. With a lament like that we could only be talking about Michael Jordan, which may explain why "Michael Jordan to the Max" has been a box-office hit at IMAX theaters around the country.

On a scale between infinite space and infinitesimal particles dwell creatures called humans. They are drops in the cosmic well. But despite their paltry insignificance in the great scheme of things, these beings are so wondrous that they can take us from universe to quark in a mere 35 minutes.That is the journey we undertake in "Cosmic Voyage," the new IMAX film playing at the Maryland Science Center as part of its "To the Stars" theme in this Baltimore bicentennial. Writer, director and producer Bayley Silleck makes us feel tiny in his depictions of the vastness of the cosmos, but he also exhilarates with this vision of our mysterious beginnings and our place in the universe.

It'll be a happy New Year after all for Rolling Stones fans who haven't been able to get what they want -- tickets, that is, to the Stones' IMAX concert film at the Maryland Science Center.The Science Center announced yesterday that it was extending the run of "At the Max" for four months, through May 25.The 89-minute film on the Science Center's 55-foot-high by 70-foot-wide screen, which originally was to run only through Jan. 26, has sold out all but a couple of performances since it opened in mid-November.

"Olympic Glory" is awash in just that -- even if the time limitations inherent to the 70mm format tend to leave the viewer frustrated and craving more.Far more effectively than the TV format on which most of us watch the Olympics, the 50-foot-tall IMAX image suggests the size of the stage on which these athletes play -- particularly the downhill skiers, whose high-speed assaults on the Nagano, Japan, course are shown in both breathtaking close-ups and awe-inspiring wide shots, where the majestic landscape seems as integral a part of the action as the competitors.

Not even the big screen of the IMAX theater can really contain the enormity of "Fires of Kuwait," a stunning new film opening today for a six-month run at the Maryland Science Center.Filmed by a five-person crew over four weeks of searing location work in September 1991, the movie intimately, dramatically documents efforts to quench the inferno of oil well fires deliberately left behind as Iraqi troops retreated from Kuwait to close the Persian Gulf war."There's no such words to say what they'd be getting into," we hear a Texas-drawl voice say early in the film, as the screen fills with orange fireballs and greasy smudges of smoke, turning day into night.

The IMAX experience, long associated with huge movie screens in specially constructed theaters usually attached to museums, is coming to a multiplex near you. Theaters in White Marsh and Columbia already are offering films in IMAX, part of an agreement between the Canadian-based film company responsible for the technology and the AMC theater chain to install digital-projection IMAX on 100 screens in 33 U.S. markets through 2010. So far, 25 screens have been installed. Columbia's, in July, was among the first.

A new study has given Ocean City a larger-than-life idea to help revitalize the resort's aging downtown: an IMAX theater anchoring an entertainment complex on the site now occupied by the U.S. Coast Guard station.The proposal for an oversize-screen theater with special visual and sound effects, similar to the one in Baltimore's Inner Harbor, was outlined in a consultants' report presented to the mayor and council of Ocean City this week.The report suggests making the IMAX theater part of an entertainment complex with a theme restaurant, another unspecified entertainment facility and stores.

Staid scientist by day, big-time entertainer by night. That may sound like a set-up for the next comic book superhero and his requisite secret identity. But these days, it's increasingly the story of IMAX theaters like the one at the Maryland Science Center, where daytime programming restricted to movies documenting the natural world gives way at night to Hollywood fare celebrating the fanciful and the make-believe. At the Science Center, it's Kung Fu Panda and U2 3D. At Smithsonian Institution museums in Washington and Northern Virginia, as well as the Franklin Institute Science Museum in Philadelphia, it's Earth's reigning box-office champion, The Dark Knight.