Fassbinder, Week One (Fri.-Sun., Feb. 28-March 2, $6, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-895-6542, www.ihousephilly.org) Hope you've been resting your eyes since the Kurosawa retrospective wrapped up on Tuesday, because it's Fassbinder's turn. Philadelphia's nine-film Fassbinder retrospective, which spans a month and three venues, is a rare and welcome chance for aficionados to relive his glory days, and for neophytes to steep themselves in the work of a filmmaker who's better appreciated in a rush than one movie at a time. Many thanks to International House, the Ritz and the Prince Music Theater for sharing the wealth and allowing the city to host the kind of ambitious film series that typically passes us by. Let's hope it won't be the last time.

The period dramas of Fassbinder's later years -- The Marriage of Maria Braun, Veronika Voss et al. -- won him the most international acclaim, but Fassbinder junkies are most excited about opening weekend, which brings three of Fassbinder's earliest movies to International House. It's not hard to see why: the mind-boggling productivity of those early years translated into an on-screen energy that even he never duplicated.

That said, 1969's Love Is Colder Than Death (Fri., 8 p.m.) is hardly the best place for new arrivals to start. Stark to the point of crudeness, it's ostensibly a gangster movie, with Fassbinder himself as a small-time pimp. But mostly it's an exercise in posing and telegraphed transgression. (He got the mix better a few months later in Katzelmacher.) It's shown with The City Tramp (1966), Fassbinder's second short film (the first is lost), an existential silent comedy about a tramp who finds a gun and then tries, unsuccessfully, to dispose of it.

1970's The American Soldier (Sat., 8 p.m.) shows Fassbinder getting drunk on Godard's experiments in noir. The main character, a gunman hired by the local police to take out criminals they can't dispose of legally, spells out another character's name thusly: "W as in war, A as in Alamo, L as in Lenin, S as in science fiction, C as in crime, H as in hell." For Fassbinder, unlike Godard, film was more a means to an end than an end in itself, so his genre deconstructions don't carry the same weight. Soldier's ending, though, is pure Fassbinder: After eliminating his hero with a deliberately arbitrary twist, Fassbinder stages a scene of grotesque emotionalism that seems to go on for days, with the dead man's brother grabbing onto his lifeless body and flopping around like a dying fish. Shown with the charmingly anarchist short, The Little Chaos (1966).

By 1971, Fassbinder was up to his 10th feature, and if the Godard influence on Beware of a Holy Whore (Sun., 7 p.m.) is just as strong, Fassbinder expertly reworks Contempt to serve his own needs. Though it's ostensibly about filmmaking, more than half the film goes by before you see a camera (compare to Contempt, which features a camera in the first shot); what Fassbinder's really interested in are the dynamics of a group of brittle temperaments confined to an enclosed space (in this case, a Spanish hotel) for weeks at a time. The results, as you'd imagine, aren't pretty, with couples uncoupling and re-coupling without provocation (most notably, Hanna Schygulla makes nice with Alphaville's Eddie Constantine), broken glasses, bloodied egos and more temper tantrums than you can shake a Xanax at. And yet, Fassbinder almost dares you to be bored, keeping the camera distant and letting the pauses linger. By the time it's done, you may feel like climbing the walls, but you'll be fascinated all the same.

Aliens (Sat., March 1, 3 p.m., $15, Prince Music Theater, 1412 Chestnut St., 215-569-9700) So you haven't got the dough to make the Weekend Film Festival scene. Don't worry: an audience with Sigourney Weaver can still be yours after this afternoon screening. Even better, you'll be treated to a screening of Aliens, which as the years go by looks more and more like the exemplary modern action movie. Laugh if you like, but try and come up with another shoot-'em-up where you can still remember the supporting characters' names a decade later. Hudson, Vasquez, we salute you.

The Trials of Henry Kissinger (premieres Mon., March 3, 9 p.m., Sundance Channel) Inspired by Christopher Hitchens' anti-Henry broadside, Eugene Jarecki's documentary makes the case that the Nobel Peace Prize winner should be tried for war crimes. Jarecki can't really get anyone except Hitchens to go that far, but the film certainly does an impressive job of cataloguing the stains on Kissinger's soul: He encouraged Nixon to prolong the Vietnam War and carry it into Cambodia; laid the groundwork for the kidnapping attempt that resulted in the murder of Salvador Allende's staunchest military supporter; and aided the Indonesian government in plotting the massacre of a 100,000 East Timorese. What it doesn't do, particularly, is prove that Kissinger's actions were qualitatively different from any of the other unindicted state advisers who've overseen the same and worse. The reason for Hitchens' choice of target was obvious -- as a self-styled gadfly, he gravitates toward big targets and sacred cows (His attack on Kissinger followed a similar assault on Mother Theresa.). Trials certainly makes the case that Kissinger should be pilloried. Prosecuted is another matter.

Lightning Over Water ($24.98 DVD) /Tigrero: A Film That Was Never Made (VHS priced for rental) If Lost in La Mancha hopes to provide for Terry Gilliam's resurrection, these two chronicles of films-that-never-were bring the lights down on their subjects with grace and dignity. Lightning, Wim Wenders' chronicle of the last days of Nicholas Ray (Rebel Without a Cause, Johnny Guitar), was intended to be a collaboration, but when it became clear that the cancer in Ray's body was too far advanced to allow him to direct, it became a sort of self-questioning memento mori. Like his colleagues Fassbinder and Herzog, Wenders was inclined to distrust documentary, so Lightning languishes in a kind of netherworld, hardly documentary but not wholly fiction. The film incorporates long passages of blurred-out video (it was shot in 1979) that contrast pointedly with well-lit, mainly improvised scenes that often parallel the real-life action. Wenders piles on the Brechtian devices, most spectacularly with a bravura tracking shot that reveals the elaborate staging behind what seems to be a moment of emotional urgency. The result is rarely more than half satisfying, but the look at Ray's last days can't help but be moving. Anchor Bay's new DVD features Wenders' own cut rather than the one he had an assistant put together for Cannes (that version was featured on the previous, now out-of-print video).

Samuel Fuller seems as hale and hearty as ever in Mika Kaurismäki's Tigrero (1994), despite the fact that he'd be dead within a couple of years. Revisiting the Brazilian jungle, where he'd planned to make a movie 40 years earlier until nervous insurance agents pulled the plug, Fuller brings along the background footage he'd shot and shows it to the Karajá villagers he'd filmed so long ago. (The film also ended up as the color dream sequences of Fuller's Shock Corridor.) Accompanied by Jim Jarmusch, whose fascination almost eclipses his own, Fuller doesn't worry over lost opportunities; instead, he, and the film, become fascinated with the Karajás' response to the footage of themselves, their fathers, their uncles. It is, finally, a tribute to the way film memorializes those who have gone before -- creators and subjects equally.