James' Journey to Jerusalem (Sat., Feb. 28, 8 p.m., $10, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-895-6542) Though The Passion of the Christ steps away from Jesus' dying agonies to remind viewers that Jesus preached love for all people, even and especially his enemies, the debate preceding the film's release has already fanned the flames of anti-Semitism (proving once again that a movie is less important than its marketing campaign). James' Journey to Jerusalem, the first feature from documentary filmmaker Ra'anan Alexandrowicz (The Inner Tour), is far less grandiose than Mel Gibson's Jesus-as-punching-bag epic, but in its unassuming way, the film presents images of Christians and Jews living side by side, not in perfect harmony, but with hard-won mutual respect. "I know you're just here to make money," says a skeptical Tel Aviv customs agent, but all James (Siyabonga Melongisi Shibe) really wants is to see the Holy Land, and take news of it back to his African village. Initially trapped in Tel Aviv, and forced to work as a house cleaner for the opportunistic Shimi (Salim Daw), James develops a taste even his meager wages can buy. Alexandrowicz puts the audience in the unusual position of rooting against the protagonist's financial success: The more money James earns, the further his trip to Jerusalem slips down the agenda. To an extent, the film uses James as a mirror to reflect the crisis of secularism in Israeli society (which explains why a film with an African lead is kicking off the Israeli Film Festival), but the character never becomes a plot device. Shibe conveys innate decency without seeming ingenuous, and when he feels something is wrong, you feel it, too. Buoyed by a bouncy Afro-pop score, James' Journey vibrates with bright colors and visual energy, though Alexandrowicz starts putting up signposts as the film nears its climax (a first-timer telltale). Until then, though, Journey is a highly pleasant trip.

Beah: A Black Woman Speaks (Sat., Feb. 28, 10:30 a.m., Tue., March 2, 3 p.m., HBO) "I thought she was 105," Lisa Gay Hamilton recalls in her documentary portrait of the actress Beah Richards, and though Richards was only in her 70s when the two met on the set of Beloved, you can't blame Hamilton for her error. After all, before Richards was 40, she'd been Sidney Poitier's onscreen mother in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, despite the fact that Poitier was only seven years her junior. Perhaps her wisdom and hard life made Richards seem older than she was, or more likely, that the only way Hollywood knew to deal with a woman of Richards' innate strength was to desexualize her, cast her as a maid or a mother-in-law. But in A Black Woman Speaks, Richards bursts through full force, a proud icon of black womanhood.

I'm embarrassed to admit I knew little of Richards' history outside the movies before watching the documentary: her life as a poet and activist (embodied by a picture of her between W.E.B Du Bois and Paul Robeson), her performances on the stage, the play she wrote and starred in. Though Hamilton's narration veers close to hokum, genuflecting before Richards' "ancient wisdom," the immensely powerful clips of Richards performing her poems (taken from a 1975 TV broadcast) speak for themselves. Richards' career in the movies necessitated compromise, but she always conveyed the sense of being uncompromising. As her contemporary Ossie Davis notes, Richards' character in Guess Who's Coming To Dinner delivers an utterly fraudulent monologue, assuring the mixed-race couple that love will obliterate their differences. "That was a lie! And she knew it was a lie," Davis says. "Beah was very successful at being able to speak words that are untruthful -- but bringing some truth and dignity to those words." Freed from the script, she doesn't mince words. When Hamilton, who conducted a series of interviews with the housebound Richards in the year before her death in 2000, opines that whatever the limitations on Richards' career in the early 1960s, at least she was making a living as an actor, Richards bites back, "You call that living? Freedom is living." Later, she adds, "It's not about you making a living as an actor. It's about you living as a human being."

Like a lot of documentary filmmakers, Hamilton, best known for her recurring role on The Practice, has become a convert to the cause; working with Richards' estate, she hopes to bring Richards' poetry and plays back into print later this year. It's hard to imagine they could be as powerful on the page as they are in performance, though, so let's hope the footage of Richards performing her work becomes available in its unedited form.

Charlie: The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin (Wed., March 3, 8 p.m. and 12:30 a.m., Turner Classic Movies) Though it's impossible to discuss Chaplin without venerating him, Richard Schickel's expansive documentary thankfully goes light on the superlatives: In a few minutes, it more effectively covers the controversy surrounding Chaplin's anti-Nazi fable, The Great Dictator (1940), than The Tramp and the Dictator, the feature-length documentary on the subject. The longtime critic for Time magazine, Schickel correctly believes that Chaplin's legacy is great enough to withstand a few potshots -- Andrew Sarris' dismissal of the early shorts, Woody Allen's disdain for The Great Dictator -- and that Chaplin's shadow is large enough to encompass them all. Considering that Chaplin directed some 73 films, most of them short subjects, the film does an admirable job of encapsulating his early career; it's nearly 45 minutes until we get to The Kid (1921), Chaplin's first feature as director. If its transitions are sometimes abrupt -- you get the sense more than once that Schickel has dropped in a dissenting voice just for the sake of dissent -- the film accomplishes the near-impossible feat of boiling Chaplin's massive oeuvre down to something you can wrap your head around. The TV premiere of Schickel's doc kicks off TCM's fairly astonishing month-long tribute to Chaplin, some 40 hours of programming spread over four consecutive Wednesdays: nearly every film he made from 1915 on.

Underworld Beauty/Kanto Wanderer/Tattooed Life/Pistol Opera ($19.95/$19.95/$19.95/$29.95 DVD) "A yakuza must wear red clothes or white," goes the refrain of Seijun Suzuki's Kanto Wanderer (1963). The reference is to the red of prison garb or the white of burial vestments, but the translation of the underworld code into aesthetic terms is no accident. Before his psychotropic Branded to Kill (1967) got him fired for making "incomprehensible movies," Suzuki directed an astonishing 42 films for Nikkatsu Studios over an 11-year period, most gangster or samurai pictures (which amounts to the same thing). Branded has long been a cult object of worship with such famous boosters as Quentin Tarantino and John Zorn, and it's not hard to see why; with its surreal imagery, intense but absurd violence and nightmare logic, it suggests a Sam Fuller movie as interpreted by Jean Cocteau.

A recent wave of DVDs has made it easier to put Branded's singularly warped vision in context. While none of them are quite its equal, Underworld Beauty, Kanto Wanderer and Tattooed Life (Home Vision) show Suzuki becoming increasingly unmoored from the demands of genre pictures, particularly as the movies climax; each one packs more into its last two reels than into all that precedes them. (Branded's secret is that it's all climax.) The black-and-white Beauty is comparatively rote stuff -- though the conveyance of a character's death via tape recording prefigures Branded's climactic use of a film projector -- but Kanto Wanderer builds to a stunning finish in which broad theatricality suddenly displaces gangster authenticity. A gun spits red flame, and a yakuza's blade literally turns a whole room red. Tattooed Life ups the ante with its deliberately schematic story of two brothers, one a quasi-beatnik, the other a paid assassin, who flee the wrath of a vengeful yakuza boss. This time, during the final bloodbath, Suzuki turns the entire screen red. In a sense, it's all a run-up to Tokyo Drifter (Criterion), Branded's sister in lunacy. More stylized than a Vincente Minnelli musical, the film sprawls across sets painted in gaudy yellows and purples, once again following a rogue hit man who is called back to Tokyo to take down a rival gang. That Suzuki has no interest in helping the audience follow the plot is perhaps best suggested by the fact that both the main character and his primary rival are called Tetsu. Instead, the 83-minute Tokyo Drifter is a short, sharp shock to the eyes, a blast to the senses. After building to such brightly-hued heights, there was nothing to do but make his next film in black and white, but Branded's reduced budget didn't save Suzuki from Nikkatsu's wrath, and when he sued to protest his firing, he was blacklisted from the industry for a decade.

Thankfully, Suzuki got back on his feet, and as his final film, 2001's Pistol Opera (Media Blasters) shows, as strange as ever. A "remake" of Branded to Kill, in so far as it vaguely alludes to the original's winner-take-all battle between professional killers, Opera is Suzuki at his most intoxicated. Reversing (if not repealing) Branded's misogyny by casting a woman in the central role, the film circles back on itself endlessly; characters die and reappear, scenes shift without warning, and the sparse dialogue is of the "Your silver bullet is crying" variety. Impenetrable but fascinating, it's a fitting memorial for a filmmaker who defied explanation.

Misc. Picks Start your Chaplin month with Modern Times (Mon.-Tue., March 1-2, County Theater; Wed.-Thu., March 3-4, Ambler Theater). The Weekend Film Festival welcomes Barry Levinson, who will present a screening of his little-seen An Everlasting Piece (Sat., Feb. 28, Prince Music Theater). The Colonial Theatre screens a new print of Beau Geste, introduced by Gary Cooper's daughter, Maria Cooper Janis (Sun., Feb. 29, 2 p.m.). On Wed., March 3, at the Prince, NYU professor Ben Hayeem screens and lectures on the mind-bending films of Yugoslav-born montagist Slavko Vorkapich (The Life and Death of a Hollywood Extra).