Alex Cox

Hailed as a wunderkind on the American midnight movie circuit in 1984 for his punk rock-fueled cult hit "Repo Man," expatriate British filmmaker Alex Cox was already pushing 30 years old and a graduate of the UCLA Film School by way of Oxford University. Balancing a love of European exploitation fare with a no less passionate admiration for the cinema of Luis Bunuel, Akira Kurosawa, Robert Aldrich and John Ford, the trenchantly funny, fiercely intelligent Cox stood poised to become Hollywood's go-to guy for major studio releases with an urgently anarchic bent. He followed "Repo Man" with the punk biopic "Sid and Nancy" (1986), which made a star of Gary Oldman, but it was the unabashedly political "Walker" (1987) that got him blacklisted in the States. Unconcerned with temptations of fame and fortune, Cox turned his hand to a string of personal projects financed with funds cadged from around the globe, including the Spanish language "Highway Patrolman" (1991), "Three Businessmen" (1998), and the micro-budgeted "Searchers 2.0" (2007), a lean and mean rejoinder to John Ford's Western classic. Marginalized but never invisible or afraid to speak his mind, Cox remained a formidable presence in world cinema, disseminating his views via the Internet and academic volumes devoted to his cinematic passions, as a film curator dedicated to the inexhaustible uses of cinema.