When The Belcourt ran a monthlong Science on Screen series last year, it featured everything from Stanley Kubrick's NASA advisor introducing a screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey to legendary titles designer Saul Bass' only feature as director, the ant-uprising thriller Phase IV, with its long-lost psychedelic ending restored. Subtitled "Connecting Cinematic Art with Hard Science," the series was a huge success, drawing science enthusiasts of all ages for discussions with scientists of varied backgrounds and fields of study.

This year — thanks to a grant from Brookline, Mass.'s Coolidge Corner Theatre, with support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation — The Belcourt is among some 22 theaters across the country devoting a month to movies that introduce scientific concepts, in however accurate or inaccurate ways, paired with appearances by experts and researchers who can speak to the actual science. The first prime-time screening is Wednesday, March 11, with Ridley Scott's atmospheric 1979 shocker Alien. Seeing the late H.R. Giger's xenomorphic horrors on the big screen is enticement enough, but check out this panel of post-film speakers:

Steve Howell is a member of the Kepler science team and specializes in research on variable and binary stars, charged-couple device detectors and instrumentation, and ultra-high precision photometry. He developed the practice of differential photometry using CCDs and has applied the technique to ground-based exo-planet transit detections, obtaining the highest precision photometry yet achieved to date. Howell is involved in educational outreach programs, especially those involving multi-wavelength astronomy, using both ground and space-based telescopes. He serves on numerous review panels and was most recently a member of the National Academy of Sciences panel on NASA's Constellation system. Howell worked with NASA to help establish the Kepler guest observer office at the Ames Research Center and now works at NASA Ames as the Kepler mission’s project scientist. Barbara Cohen is a planetary scientist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center interested in geochronology and geochemistry of planetary samples from the moon, Mars and asteroids. She is a principal investigator on multiple NASA research projects, a member of the Mars Exploration Rover mission team that is still operating the Opportunity rover, and the principal investigator for Lunar Flashlight, a lunar cubesat mission that will be launched in 2018. She is the PI principal investigator for Marshall’s Noble Gas Research Laboratory and is developing a flight version of her noble-gas geochronology technique (the Potassium-Argon Laser Experiment) for use on future planetary landers and rovers. She has participated in the Antarctic Search for Meteorites program over three seasons, where she helped recover more than a thousand pristine samples for the U.S. collection. Asteroid 6186 Barbcohen is named for her. Linda Kah, the Kenneth G. Walker Associate Professor of Carbonate Sedimentology and Geochemistry at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, focuses on integrating sedimentology, stratigraphy, geochemistry, and paleobiology in understanding the evolution of the Earth’s biosphere. Research projects include reconstructing the ocean-atmospheric oxygenation and the redox structure of Mesoproterozoic shallow marine systems, exploring the effects of changing ocean circulation on the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event, and characterizing microbe-mineral interactions in the mineralization of Holocene lacustrine microbialites. In addition, she is investigating potential habitable environments as co-investigator on the Mars Science Laboratory mission.

It's worth clicking on The Belcourt's schedule for the entire series, running March 6-30. Events include a rare showing of 2001 effects master Douglas Trumbull's ahead-of-its-time 1983 thriller Brainstorm (March 16), with virtual-reality demonstrations in the lobby and a talk by Vanderbilt psychology professor and vision researcher Randolph Blake; Andrew Bujalski's delightful Computer Chess (March 23) with a post-film panel of female software programmers; and the closing-night screening of Bill Morrison's The Great Flood (March 30), an assemblage of archival footage from the unimaginably catastrophic 1927 Mississippi River flood, with a live score composed and performed by master jazz guitarist Bill Frisell.

In addition, there'll be midnight shows of some Country Life favorites, including John Carpenter's underrated Prince of Darkness (March 6-7), Mike Judge's Idiocracy (March 13-14), Ridley Scott's director's cut of Blade Runner (March 20-21) and Terry Gilliam's "La Jetée" reworking 12 Monkeys (March 27-28), as well as Saturday-morning children's screenings of Brad Bird's The Iron Giant (March 14), Joe Dante's Innerspace (March 21) and Carroll Ballard's beautiful migration drama Fly Away Home (March 28). Watch also for the horror sensation of early 2015, David Robert Mitchell's It Follows, on March 20 with an opening-night talk by Vanderbilt infectious-disease epidemiologist Sten H. Vermund.