Drunken Angel/High and Low ($8.50, Prince Music Theater, 1412 Chestnut St., 215-569-9700, www.princemusictheater.org) Protesting that Akira Kurosawa's samurai movies overshadow the rest of his work is a little like complaining that John Ford is mainly thought of as a director of Westerns. True, it's unfair to Kurosawa's legacy to pigeonhole him in a given genre, but being known "only" for Seven Samurai, Ran, Yojimbo, Rashomon and Throne of Blood (to name a few) is hardly the worst fate a director's reputation can meet. Nevertheless, this week's entries in the Prince's Kurosawa-Mifune retrospective help set the record straight.

Kurosawa is often called the most western of Japanese directors, and while that's an oversimplification, it's true that he did explicitly diverge from Japanese tradition, taking unprecedented cues from American directors in particular. 1948's Drunken Angel (Sun., Feb 2 and Tue., Feb. 4, 7 p.m.) marks Kurosawa's first collaboration with Toshirô Mifune, and is considered the first where Kurosawa had the control he wanted over the production. In the story of a gangster (Mifune) who turns to an alcoholic doctor (Seven Samurai's Takashi Shimura) for help with an advanced case of tuberculosis, the influence of American noir (particularly Hawks and Huston) is palpable. (Check the shafts of light filtering through the blinds in the doctor's office.) That the gangster's illness stands in for Japan's post-war woes is perhaps a tad on-the-nose, but the doctor's struggle to do good in spite of himself, and despite his reservations about the man he's trying to save, invokes a powerful moral dilemma. It's fascinating to see Kurosawa still trying to work out the balance between open-ended imagery and ruthless narrative drive; in a way, it tells you more than the movies where the seams don't show.

1963's High and Low (Sun., Feb. 2, 4 p.m.; Tue., Feb. 4, 9:15 p.m.) boasts the unlikeliest source material of any Kurosawa film: tough-guy crime novelist Ed McBain's King's Ransom. Here, Mifune is on the other side of the law, as a wealthy industrialist who becomes a kidnapper's target. Rather than tell a story of primal protection, though, Kurosawa focuses on a grayer moral choice: The kidnap victim is not a member of the wealthy man's family, but his chauffeur's son. Again, Kurosawa twists the noir genre to accommodate the dilemmas of Japanese society, as Mifune's character ponders the consequences of giving the kidnapper what he wants. (The film's Japanese title translates as Heaven and Hell.) These two films won't make you wish Kurosawa had spent less time on ronin and more on rat-a-tat-tat, but they're a vivid demonstration of just how attuned to his culture Akira Kurosawa was, even when making movies set hundreds of years before.

Maggie Growls (Thu., Jan. 30, 7:30 p.m., $8.50, Prince Music Theater) Far from going gently into the night, Maggie Kuhn used her golden years to reinvent herself as an activist. The founder of the Gray Panthers, the Philadelphia-based Kuhn created not only an organization that helped eliminate the mandatory national retirement age, but set a conscious example for the country's ever-growing over-65 population, defiantly proclaiming herself "old," insisting that age not be a barrier to a continuing interest in life, sex and social change. Produced by Philadelphia's Barbara Attie and Janet Goldwater (Daring to Resist, Landowska), Maggie Growls incorporates interviews with Studs Terkel and Ralph Nader (who declines to give an on-camera "Gray Panther growl") as well as animations from Wynnewood's Paul and Sandra Fierlinger. For anyone who's ever thought that it's too late for them to make a difference, Maggie Kuhn's story is a pointed counterexample.

Fidel (Fri., Jan. 31, 7:30 p.m.; Sat., Feb. 1, 5 p.m. and 9:15 p.m.; Sun., Feb. 2, 2 p.m., $8.50, Prince Music Theater) Normally, a movie's press kit comes filled with laudatory notices, but the best First Run Features' kit can offer is a Miami Herald article calling Estela Bravo's Fidel "a fawning, hysterical valentine to a dictator, disguised as a piece of journalism." That's no criticism of First Run's publicity staff; read through the movie's reviews and the Herald article starts to look like a love letter, noting as it does that the movie "has considerable intellectual value as a glimpse into Castro's propaganda apparatus" -- although that's a little like saying The Triumph of the Will has great production values. The movie certainly doesn't bother to hide its bias; the opening narration calls Castro "a socialist survivor in a capitalist world" and frames the dispute over Castro's policies thusly: "For some, he is a demon; for others, a symbol of resistance and social justice." Of course, that's true, as far as it goes, but it neglects the many for whom Castro is neither. In addition to recapitulating various myths and photo-ops, Fidel smooths over misdeeds that can't be avoided; there's no mention of the Mariel boatlift, barely a nod to the tens of thousands who have fled Castro's Cuba -- footage of Cubans climbing aboard a makeshift raft is voiced-over with the explanation, "some chose to leave," an understatement so grotesque it defies reason -- and the Cuban Missile Crisis is justified, paradoxically, as necessary to protect Cuba's sovereignty and a betrayal of the Soviet Union. Bravo rallies plenty of witnesses to her cause, but they're not doing themselves any favors; Alice Walker comes off looking like a chowderhead, while if Harry Belafonte had any credibility left after his ludicrous attacks on Colin Powell, he'd neatly do away with it here. (Exactly how Sydney Pollack fits into the mix is anyone's guess.) The film reaches a low point when defending Castro's abuse of civil rights; one pro-Castro journalist opines that having free speech is "tricky when your country is constantly harassed by a neighbor 90 miles away."

All that said, though, it's worth pondering why so many have rallied to Castro's cause, from Malcolm X to Nelson Mandela (the latter mainly due to Castro's support of Angola). Given the vociferous, not to say absurd, level of anti-Castro rhetoric in the U.S., to say nothing of the continued support for the obviously counterproductive and inhumane embargo that keeps Cuba in poverty (the most fertile soil for any dictator), there's a real need for a balanced cinematic evaluation of Castro's presence and influence. This isn't even close.

Daughter from Danang (Wed., Feb. 5 and Fri., Feb. 7, 7:30 p.m., $8.50, Prince Music Theater) Gail Dolgin and Vicente Franco's wrenching documentary makes an encore appearance after sellouts at last year's Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema.

Hearts & Minds ($39.95 DVD) It's hard to believe Peter Davis' anti-Vietnam documentary won the Academy Award in 1974 -- not because it's undeserving, but because it's so much more provocative and artful than the PBS-style dreck that usually nabs the statue these days. Chalk it up to the mood of the times rather than declining aesthetic standards; it's pretty clear Hearts & Minds won because it underlined the message Hollywood was too chicken to send with its own movies. Drawing some of its footage (and more of its connections) from Emile de Antonio's In the Year of the Pig (recently shown as part of International House's war film series), Hearts & Minds goes, appropriately enough, for emotion over intellect; released after the war's end, it's an elegy rather than a cri de coeur. (The film's look, too, is elegant color rather than scrappy black and white.) Through the haze of a Vietnam hangover, Davis ponders the war's ramifications at home -- not what it did to them, but what it did to us. One gung-ho vet tells a crowd of schoolchildren that the country would be great "if it wasn't for the people. They make a mess of everything," while an unidentified girl on the sidelines of a support-the-troops parade opines, "Once in a while, I think about [the war,] but I like to think about the things that are happening right now, to me." Davis' audio commentary and a handful of booklet essays provide context, but none so compelling as the day's newspapers, which show the U.S. on the verge of entering another war that enjoys scant international and soft domestic support (although the comparison ends there; Ho Chi Minh was a liberator, not a tyrant). Vietnam hasn't been forgotten, certainly, but some of its lessons have been gathering dust; Hearts & Minds shines them up and puts them on display.

24 Hour Party People ($26.98 DVD) "The miracle of this movie is that such a collection of bloody downright lies should tell several profound truths," says Factory Records impresario Tony Wilson on his commentary track for 24 Hour Party People's DVD; you can imagine director Michael Winterbottom and screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce smiling. The movie makes no pretensions to the accuracy of its account of the Manchester music scene, 1976-1992; rather it revels in its own fictions, even inviting real-life characters on screen to dispute the veracity of what you've just seen. With less self-congratulation (on- and off-screen) than Adaptation, the film deftly investigates the relationship between cinema and life; the lines blur, and 24 Hour Party People paints with the colors. Perhaps fittingly, Wilson's commentary is loads more engaging than the one by British comedian Steve Coogan, who plays Wilson in the movie; you know you're in trouble when Coogan starts his off by opining that the movie doesn't really need a commentary track. Though Wilson rages against every factual error, even the more trivial ones, he embraces the movie's spirit as well. Discussing the end of The Hacienda, the Factory nightclub that helped spawn acid house, Wilson recalls how it never had a proper closing-night bash as depicted in the film, since the club's owners thought the shutdown was only temporary. "But there was a last night at The Hacienda," he says, discussing the scene, "and this was it." Life becomes fiction, and fiction becomes life: sounds a bit like a New Order lyric, yeh?