FILM: Japanese renaissance man Takeshi (Beat) Kitano – TV personality, stand-up comic, filmmaker, screenwriter and hot-tempered movie tough guy – is getting a well-deserved salute by Anthology Film Archives. Through Jan. 17, the East Village art house will screen three sizzling, droll gangster movies starring Kitano. Two – “Fireworks” (“Hana-Bi”) and “Sonatine” – were directed by him and were included on many New York critics’ top-10 lists for 1998. The third, “Gonin,” was helmed by Takashi Ishii. Kitano, now 51, was an elevator operator in a Tokyo burlesque theater when he teamed with Kiyoshi Kaneko to become the Two Beats, hailed as the alternative comedians of the ’70s. By the ’80s Kitano, as Beat Takeshi, was solo star on a popular TV show in Japan. He made his movie acting debut in 1981 as a brutal sergeant in Nagisa Oshima’s “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence,” a World War II POW drama. “The good thing about having done so many different things is that I can express so much varied experience in one medium – film,” Kitano has said. “Right now, filmmaking is the most enjoyable thing I’m doing, but if I could find yet another way of expression which could even include film, I would move on to that.” The Anthology is at Second Avenue and Second Street in the East Village; (212) 505-5110.-