QDoc: Portland Queer Documentary Film Festival
Remember before streaming, when everyone was always sad that we had all these channels but nothing was ever on? (Does this paper have readers young enough to not know that agony?!) Anyway, QDoc, Portland’s annual gay and lesbian documentary film festival, presents the opposite problem: There aren’t a ton of movies in each year’s festival, but the movies that are generally excellent. ELINOR JONES
Hollywood Theatre, click here for titles and showtimes

McMenamins' Annual UFO Festival
No one would have believed in the first years of the 21st century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. "No one would have believed,” wrote H.G. Wells in 1898’s The War of the Worlds. And yet… CAN YOU ARGUE WITH THE FACTS??? The facts that clearly prove WE ARE NOT ALONE??? No. You cannot. But if you’re still not convinced, all those facts (and more!) will be readily available at the 19th annual McMenamins UFO Festival in McMinnville, which celebrates the 1950 photographs taken by farmers Paul and Evelyn Trent—photographs that CLEARLY SHOW a UFO that is OMINOUSLY HOVERING above an unsuspecting McMinnville! Sixty-eight years later, downtown McMinnville gets taken over by the UFO Fest, which features music, booze, an “alien pet costume contest,” the “Alien Abduction Dash 5K," and panels about everything from a 1994 incident in which “60 schoolchildren saw a UFO land and beings approach," to government’s stance on “the modern UFO problem,” to trusty old standbys like “mutilated cattle." Don’t miss the UFO Speakers Panel, a mega-panel that lines up a slew of the fest's guests for a Q&A that will likely cover conspiracy theories, creepy aliens, nice aliens, skin walkers, Sasquatch, and the incontrovertible fact that humans will soon be conquered and enslaved by creatures we cannot comprehend. Might as well drink some beer and wear some tinfoil hats in the meantime! (In case you think I am joking, I am not: Some people here will be wearing tinfoil hats. If you’re smart, so will you.) ERIK HENRIKSEN
May 17-19, Hotel Oregon, free-$80, all ages

Brown Calculus, Korgy & Bass
Brown Calculus has done the math and intergalactic jazz is not just real, it's spectacular.
9 pm, The Fixin' To, $7

The Bugle
Losing John Oliver to HBO didn't slow down the irrepressible Andy Zaltzman any. Okay, maybe a little bit, for a little time. But his comedic news podcast The Bugle is still going strong, now with a rotating cast of amazing guest hosts every week, and now with a live stop at the Alberta Rose.
8 pm, Alberta Rose Theatre, $25-30

No Kind of Rider, Months, Swim Swam Swum
Portland-via-Tulsa quintet No Kind Of Rider spearhead a night of quality Pacific Northwest indie rock and pop ahead of their forthcoming debut album, Savage.
8:30 pm, Holocene, $8

A L I E N S
Aliens is the best film James Cameron ever made. Not the biggest—lord knows the man himself has apparently conflated the two terms as his career exploded all over the box office in ever louder, ever-more-simple pandering blasts of spectacle—but the best. Imagine the audacity to follow up one of the most influential horror films ever made by turning it into a Vietnam War allegory that is also a metaphor for motherhood that is also an action film so perfectly paced that most people don't realize it takes over an hour before a single fanged penis-beast from outer space shows up. And imagine executing on that idea so well that movies, comics, and video games spend the next 30-plus years strip-mining every inch of it for inspiration. Cameron never wrote another script this tight, never directed actors this precisely, and never made a film this palpable—almost unbearable—again. BOBBY ROBERTS
9:25 pm, Academy Theater, $3-4

Pickwick, Smokey Brights
Frontman Galen Disston and his Seattle indie rock outfit bring their modern soul and R&B back through the Doug Fir in support of their 2017 full-length, LoveJoys. Fellow Seattleites Smokey Brights get things started with their own blend of driving rock and pop.
9 pm, Doug Fir, $15-18

Don't forget to check out our Things To Do calendar for even more things to do!