The Velvet Underground Film Festival: Re-loaded (Thu.-Fri., April 21-22, 8 p.m., $6-$10, Moore College of Art & Design, 20th and Race sts., 215-568-4515, x4099) Secret Cinema reissues its popular VU/Warhol program with bonus tracks. Reprised is A Symphony of Sound, which captures more than an hour of vintage Velvet Underground performance, right down to the moment where the cops stop the show. New stuff — 65 percent by SC's estimate — includes Warhol Screen Tests, half an hour of Nico, Lou Reed and John Cale (along with Susan Sontag and Helmut Newton) testing their star potential; EPI Projection Reel, designed for use in the band's "Exploding Plastic Inevitable" stage show, which includes more screen tests (Reed, Sterling Morrison and even Salvador Dalí); and Moe Gets Tied Up, an hour of the band tying stone-faced drummer Moe Tucker to a chair and tormenting her with whips and food. A Symphony of Sound is the only film to feature the Velvet Underground actually playing music, but the others should contribute substantially to understanding the milieu out of which the band came.

Eat the Document (Fri., April 22, 7:30 p.m., free, Philadelphia Ethical Society, 1906 S. Rittenhouse Square, 215-735-3456) Re-edited from a straightforward tour documentary that aired once on ABC, Bob Dylan's chronicle of the controversial 1966 British tour that unveiled his electric sound to a sometimes-hostile public ranks with Robert Frank's Cocksucker Blues in the annals of unavailable rock docs, although Document focuses less on bad behavior than the dislocation of the road. Opening with Dylan snorting an unidentified substance, the film, shot by Dont Look Back's D.A. Pennebaker, is a headlong rush of mystique and hostility. Chagrined folkies spew venom for the camera, while Dylan responds to a continental interviewer's demand, "Aren't you sincere about anything?" with a perfect shrug. Never officially released, although a bootleg DVD has made the BitTorrent rounds, Eat the Document is contraband of the highest order; we won't tell if you won't.

Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop (Sat., April 23, 7 p.m., and Sun., April 24, 2 p.m., $15, Sedgwick Cultural Center, 7137 Germantown Ave., 215-248-9229) Released on DVD four years after its theatrical run with nonexistent promotion, Danny Hoch's one-man, multicharacter attempt to calculate hip-hop's cultural impact, as well as the culture's impact on hip-hop, gets two Reelblack screenings; the admission price includes a take-home copy. The characters in Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop, which Hoch (Whiteboyz) continues to perform, range from millionaire rappers to inmates with AIDS, and the movie's presentation intercuts studio footage with performances in a theater, a park and a prison. The scattershot result doesn't add up to the grand statement Hoch probably intends, often seeming like no more than a showcase for his impressive command of accents and his less impressive acting. Hoch creates voice but not character; his ideal medium might be radio. Too many of Hoch's characters are simplistic or self-serving, designed to validate his audience's cultural superiority rather than question it. There's his one-note portrayal of a white Montana boy who raps in his bedroom and pretends he's black, a cheap shot at kids who don't happen to be born in big cities, and Hoch's only first-person monologue, which recalls the time he signed to play a Hispanic pool boy on Seinfeld and walked out of rehearsals after being asked to do the character with a Spanish accent. He scoffs at Jerry Seinfeld's suggestion that playing the character as written would be "funnier," apparently unable to swallow the idea that the specter of a Spanish-speaking service worker stalking Seinfeld's character might be designed to kid white paranoia rather than enforce it. When he sticks to thumbnail sketches, Hoch can be a vivid portraitist, but his cultural commentary is sketchy and, even in 2001, out of date, unless X cap and O.J. references are your idea of the newest latest.

The Concrete Revolution (Sun., April 24, 7 p.m., $10, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-895-6542) As part of International House's "Symbols of China" series, filmmaker Xiaolu Guo arrives to present this documentary essay on the changing face of contemporary Beijing. "This is our new civil war," she narrates over images of apartment complexes rising where courtyards once stood. China, she says, has gone from "the Cultural Revolution to the Industrial Revolution." Guo focuses on the social transformations wrought and reflected in China's new urban landscape, where the surroundings of Tiananmen Square are painted green to compensate for the lack of trees (considered by Mao a waste of soil better used for crops), but also takes account of the human cost: the construction workers who travel hundreds of miles from their home villages, who need three permits simply to stay in Beijing, and who go for months without their promised government paychecks. "You are a piece of nothing without money in this society," says one who cannot hold back tears at the thought of his separation from his wife and daughter.

Globalization also introduces a new sentiment into the Chinese vocabulary, which seems slightly less indulgent in its new context: middle-class guilt. Guo, educated both at the Beijing Film Academy and in London, contemplates life in the modern flats her subjects are constructing, a possibility for her but out of reach for them. That The Concrete Revolution inevitably filters its discoveries through Guo's narration (her first novel comes out in the fall) lends the movie a solipsistic quality, as if Chinese poverty didn't exist until she discovered it, and the narration's facile ironies sometimes betray the complexity of the movie's images, as when Guo snarks that the U.S. Embassy is being enlarged for the 2008 Beijing Olympics so that more Chinese can emigrate to the U.S. "and open more restaurants." But as a companion piece to Jia Zhang-ke's The World, The Concrete Revolution validates the notion of Beijing as the center of a country that is changing too fast for fiction to keep up with it.

Misc. Picks 48 Hour Film Project winner Das Kluge Chimp (don't ask) celebrates its victory and hopes to recoup some of its members' out-of-pocket expenses with a bash/fundraiser at Blue in Green: Five bucks includes a screening of winner The Peryton, in which a winged beast stalks an indie film crew (Sat., 8 p.m.). Speaking of beasts, Bryn Mawr Film Institute has started midnight screenings on Fridays; this week's is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.