Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, renovated and expanded, ready for reopening

After the feast of holiday movies, the film world turns towardL.A.'sGolden GlobesandUtah'sSundance Film Festival. Both are in mid-January, and both have history and glitz going for them.

But if you want to get all that history and glitz at the end of a simple subway ride, go toAstoria, Queens.

That's where the renovated and expandedMuseum of the Moving Imageis. And next Saturday, this one-of-a-kind monument to the art and entertainment of movies - three decades old in 2011 - reopens after three years with a slate of screenings, events, symposiums and memorabilia exhibits.

In a busy city full of art, this is something to slow down for.

While awards are being polished and distributed and moviegoers are compiling best-of-the-year lists - whether they're paid to do it or not - going to a movie is still one of New Yorkers' favorite things to do. If a neighborhood theater adds new seats, you love it; when the local multiplex raises popcorn prices, you complain about it, and as the coming weeks bring the inevitable dogs of January,you dread it. More on that in a second.

But at all times,New Yorkis a movie city. The art form was born here, and of course is still made here - at Silvercup Studios in Queens, inBrooklynat the Navy Yard and, chances are, right around from the corner from where you are now. Yes, we watch them on our TVs and computers and ever-shrinking hand-held devices, but they're made to be seen bigger than life, in the dark and surrounded by strangers experiencing them with us.

That can mean the reRun Gastropub Theater inDUMBO, at theStaten IslandorHarlemInternational Film Festivals or atLong Island City's Socrates Park on a hot summer night. And, now, at the Museum of the Moving Image's huge 267-seat theater, debuting Saturday at 4 p.m. with a screening ofStanley Kubrick?a>??s"2001: A Space Odyssey."

Future shows includePaul Newmanin"The Hustler"(Jan. 15 and 16), theJames Cagney-Warner Bros.crime drama"The Mayor of Hell"(Jan. 30), the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musical"Follow the Fleet"(Feb. 6) and the classic film noir"Out of the Past"(Feb. 18).

For additional treasures out of the past, the museum has another, 68-seat screening room, as well as more behind-the-scenes glimpses at movie history than you’ll find in a whole night toggling between TCM andeBay.

And like the leap in Kubrick's classic from"The Dawn of Man"to the"Jupiter Mission,"the museum goes from the bygone - toys, photos and equipment from the silent era through 2010 - to the future. There are state-of-the-art 3-D exhibits, animation workshops, an experimental production studio and an interactive video-online-performance mashup called Signal to Noise, starting at 8 p.m. on Saturday).

There's even a new Education Center, which features media labs for students and high-definition cameras for on-the-spot filmmaking.

Now that's the way to stay focused on movies.

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