Maryland Film Festival

In one day at this year's Maryland Film Festival, you can see a Cannes Palme d'Or winner, like Thai director Apichatpong "Joe" Weerasethakul's "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives," and watch a homegrown documentary, like Ramona Diaz's "The Learning,' about Filipino women recruited to teach in the Baltimore school system. "One of the exciting things I've noticed this year is that, simultaneous to the festival's continued growth into international cinema, we're also seeing an explosion of world-class filmmaking here in Baltimore," said programming director Eric Hatch.

Thanks to the Maryland Film Festival, it ought to get good and loud and even lyrical at Station North this Thursday through Sunday with a vital, eclectic slate of music-oriented movies. Alice Donut, for a quarter-century a bulwark of Baltimore's underground rock scene, rockets into above-ground view with "Freaks in Love. " "Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone" should set audiences bobbing to the punk-pop-rock-funk sounds of Los Angeles' favorite sextet. Baltimore Symphony Orchestra music director Marin Alsop will present "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" — with its galvanizing Ennio Morricone score — to dramatize the operatic glory of inspired movie music.

Baltimore films, rock documentaries, movies from Thailand and Portugal and one described as a "stylish gangster thriller from the Democratic Republic of Congo" are just a few of the films that will play at this year's Maryland Film Festival, which announced a partial list of its lineup Tuesday. Overall, 115 or so features and short films will be played at the festival, which runs May 5-8 at The Charles Theatre and several locations in the city, said the festival's director, Jed Dietz.

Matt Porterfield is a hard-knocks poet — a rhapsodist in black and blue — whose work gains strength from its Baltimore roots. Porterfield located his first two movies, 2007's "Hamilton" and his current "Putty Hill," quite ruthlessly in the Baltimore neighborhhoods that give these films their names. So acute is his focus on authentic textures and characters — and so revealing are the epiphanies he ignites on the fly — that these tales of working-class endurance and rebellion have reverberated around the world.

"Night Catches Us," Tanya Hamilton's complex treatment of the Black Panther legacy, is perfect viewing for Black History Month. Just released on a Magnolia DVD, it is an emotion-charged memory play and a film noir in more ways than one. It contains one human time bomb — a trigger-happy street kid with delusions of political glory — and several characters carrying scars from a fatal police-Panther showdown. It's a personal work of art, not a docudrama. It's a stirring debut for Hamilton as a keen, intuitive writer-director.

When Walter Hill was flipping through the first 40 pages of the science fiction/horror script that became "Alien," he considered it turgid, a snooze. "I thought it was just terrible," said Hill, who co-wrote and co-produced the movie with his partner, David Giler. It barely diverted Hill from watching Jimmy Carter's acceptance speech at the 1976 Democratic convention, which was on his TV in the background. Then Hill got to the now-infamous "chest-burster scene," where a creepy little critter — with a head like a slimy, tiny sperm whale — explodes from the chest of a spaceship's executive officer and traumatizes the crew.

White-collar scandals come so quickly these days that if you don't work on Wall Street or inside the Beltway, it's difficult to distinguish between scoundrels. When you first hear the name " Jack Abramoff," you might think that he was the one who ripped off everyone from Elie Wiesel to Steven Spielberg. No, that was Bernie Madoff, the New York financier who amassed a fortune with a Ponzi scheme.. Abramoff is the Washington lobbyist who became notorious for ruthlessly overcharging American Indian tribes by scores of millions of dollars while currying support for their casinos.

Maryland Film Festival programmer Eric Hatch thinks the acclaimed Greek movie "Dogtooth" is a "dynamic conversation-starter. " He predicts that it will draw cinematic adventure-seekers to the Charles when it opens there on Friday — and will get them to argue with each other afterwards. I agree, even though it made me feel like throwing things at the screen. "Dogtooth" pivots on a successful industrialist who has raised two girls and a boy in a secluded compound and, with his compliant wife, turned it into an alternate reality.

In May, the Maryland Film Festival invited experimental musician Dan Deacon to screen a movie of his choice at the Charles Theatre . It was a regular feature for them: Musician Jonathan Richman once screened "Cyrano de Bergerac," and cartoonist Harvey Pekar showed "The Bicycle Thief" some years before. But instead of picking the Oscar bait typical of most film festivals, Deacon went down market. He opted for an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. He could have chosen "Kindergarten Cop," or even "Conan the Barbarian," but he settled on Paul Verhoeven's "Total Recall.

Artscape We can't guarantee that you'll have a good time at Artscape, but at the very least, you should enjoy trying. After all, it's not every city that can lay claim to having the country's biggest free outdoor arts festival. So listen to Cold War Kids on Saturday or Wale on Sunday, sample short films at the Charles courtesy of the Maryland Film Festival, experience dance at its finest courtesy of the young dancers of Graham II on Sunday, laugh throughout the weekend at the comics of LOL@Artscape, marvel at the magic of George Gilbert on Sunday.