DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. Filmfest DC Tonight is opening night for Filmfest DC, which goes until May 3. The opening selection is French director Phillipe Faucon's Two Ladies, and over the next week and a half the festival screens over 70 features, plus shorts, at venues all over town. The international film festival has a concentration on Latin American film......

Patti Smith. The Patti Smith. The godmother of punk. Beat poet. Artist. Musician. Rock journalist. Ex-girlfriend of some of art and music's most talented men. Subject of a documentary which just premiered at this year's Sundance Film Festival. Recent inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In short, quite possibly the coolest woman alive. About a month ago, she and her band put on a rousing rock show at the 9:30 club. This......

FRIDAY >> The legendary Patti Smith is at the 9:30 Club tonight, and tickets are incredibly still available for $25. Doors at 9, show at 10 p.m. >> The idea of attending a lighting display, particularly after Christmas, might sound a bit cheesy. But the Garden of Lights in Wheaton might just change your mind. The designer tours the county gardens each year for inspiration for his display; this year, it invokes the four seasons.......

>> This week, start your arts viewing with a fascinating documentary on the lives of a powerful curator/collector and his ever controversial photographer lover. Black White + Gray: A Portrait of Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe examines the lives of these two men through those who knew them best, such as close friend Patti Smith, and how Wagstaff's relationship with Mapplethorpe vaulted them both into careers as art world visionaries, not the least of which......

Written by DCist contributor Maria Flores Sometime in the early 1970s, when the photographs in Melody Maker, NME, and Rolling Stone were no longer enough to satiate his appetite, Claude Gassian swapped his guitar for a 35mm camera and took to the road with his finger on the shutter button. So began his photographic conquest to document the lives of some of his favorite musical artists. Over three decades later, his photographs stand alone as......