American director Alex Cox remains most famous for the first two films he ever made: 1984’s Repo Man and 1987’s Sid & Nancy. He’s continued to be active for more than two decades since, though you wouldn’t know it from the lack of distribution his films have received – Cox seems content with making cult movies for microscopic audiences.

A crueler critic might suggest that he deserves his lot in life as middling obscurist, given that most of his recent works have been revisions or sequels to his previous films (Repo Chick, Straight to Hell Returns) or hommages to other people’s films (Searchers 2.0).

But this time, Microcinema, which has been handling most of the worldwide DVD distribution for Cox’s recent movies, has plumbed the director’s archive for a feature made during his artistic peak – 1991’s Highway Patrolman (Nov. 15, $22.49) – and it’s a strong enough film to merit a reconsideration of some of Cox’s more unsavory features to come.

Conceived in Los Angeles but shot in Mexico from a Spanish-language script by Lorenzo O’Brien, the genesis of Highway Patrolman reveals that, even in ‘91, Cox had to flee the constraints of Hollywood to make the art he wanted (he would later shoot a TV movie in Japanese). The result is unlike any cop movie I’ve ever seen, save for the 2002 American indie Evenhand, which owes a debt to Cox.

In carefully composed single takes that plant characters firmly in time and space, Cox follows young cadet Pedro Rojas (Roberto Sosa) from the moment he receives his badge and gun through the day-to-day grind of police work in the arid deserts and dusty streetscapes of Mexico City. Time, inexorably, marches on, in episodic fashion: He discovers that bribery is the only way things get done in his corrupt jurisdiction; he gets married but finds himself frequenting a prostitute to relieve the stress of his life; he drives a broken-down jalopy until it dies on him shortly before a tragedy, leaving him with a gaping chasm of guilt. All the while, the ghost of his absent, disapproving father looks down on him (literally, in one surreal scene), his melancholic presence awash in pathos.

At the time of its release, L.A. Weekly called Highway Patrolman “Robert Bresson with a rock ‘n’ roll pulse,” which is a clever description, but I don’t see either of these influences on the screen. The film, and the patrolman’s existential job, is more like free jazz that meanders, unrooted but prone to occasional returns to structured cohesion. We grow so inured by the film’s workaday, slice-of-life ennui that its moments of violence hit us, and Pedro, with the sudden and brutal impact of an oncoming train.

As the danger increases and more blood is shed, Highway Patrolman begins to borrow the syntax of two gritty genres: the war film and the Western. Like the former, Pedro navigates an environment that increasingly resembles a battlefield, complete with a moment in which a colleague dies in his arms. And like the latter, Pedro starts to resemble Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name (Cox is a student of spaghetti Westerns) – a rogue figure operating in an apparently lawless world – whose (anti)climactic moment involves a rock-obscured shootout with another lone gunman.

All of which goes a long way to distinguish Highway Patrolman from the machismo-laden, reductive tradition of the Hollywood cop as valiant, justice-dispensing hero. Cops are flesh-and-blood humans like the rest of us, and, like soldiers, they’re sometimes scared and confused.

DVD Watch: Nov. 8: This a great week for cult and mainstream classics alike making their Blu-ray debuts, with none more exciting than Blue Velvet (MGM, $15.99). The selling point for this edition of David Lynch’s twisted masterstroke is the 50 minutes of newly discovered lost footage available as a bonus feature. The other extras are not new to this disc, but it’s always nice to see Siskel and Ebert’s legendary review of the film; Ebert comes off as a moral crusader and Siskel the critical adult who can separate the art from his emotions. Also, don’t miss The Collector (Image, $12.99), William Wyler’s atypical psychological thriller from 1965; Fanny and Alexander (Criterion, $40.99), Ingmar Bergman’s sweepingly personal holiday masterpiece; and To Die For (Image, $12.99), Gus Van Sant’s bracingly effective 1995 dark comic vehicle for Nicole Kidman.

Nov. 15: This week, Infernal Affairs (Vivendi, $15.99), the Korean actioner that inspired The Departed, makes its premiere on Blu-ray. Some assert that it remains superior to Martin Scorsese’s Best Picture winner; judge for yourself in shimmering hi-def. Also, don’t miss Blu-ray debut of Krzystof Kieslowski’s Three Colors Trilogy (Criterion, $55.99 or $41.99 for the DVD set), one of the reigning achievements of ‘90s art cinema and three of the finest performances that Juliette Binoche, Irene Jacob and Julie Delpy ever gave. It’s a film where color really matters, and, this side of a newly struck 35mm print, those colors should never look better. This week also finds Paramount bowing the Blu-ray debut of George Cukor’s adaptation of My Fair Lady ($19.99).

Nov. 21: Things start to get quiet leading into the holidays, which is surprising, but there are still a couple of must-see titles hitting shelves over the next two weeks. Today sees two silent classics from D.W. Griffith receiving the Blu-ray polish from Kino: the unassailably important Birth of a Nation ($23.99) and 1920’s underrated Way Down East ($21.99). Elsewhere, Criterion unveils a release of Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men ($27.99 Blu-ray, $17.99 DVD) that includes new and archival interviews, a video essay on the story’s transition from stage to screen, and even Frank Schaffner’s 1955 TV version of the play.

Nov. 28: Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams (MPI, $18.99 Blu-ray and $24.99 DVD – yes, the DVD is more expensive) is one of the year’s best films, but it may lose some of its entrancing luster if you don’t have a 3D television. Reel Injun, a hit at last year’s South By Southwest festival and directed by Neil Diamond (not that Neil Diamond) is a look at Hollywood’s depiction of Native Americans from the silent era through the independent films of the ‘00s. Clint Eastwood and Jim Jarmusch are among the interview subjects.

TCM Watch: At 4:30 p.m. Nov. 14, I wouldn’t miss I Married a Witch, an English-language fantasy from Rene Clair about a 17^th-century witch who returns to modern times to plague a descendent of her persecutor. It’s not available on DVD in America. For the most part, November marks an interesting month for noir and crime films. Chase a Crooked Shadow (8 p.m. Nov. 16), also unavailable on DVD in the States, is a tense little thriller from 1958 with Richard Todd and Anne Baxter.

Nov. 22 is a great day to bookmark; first, check out Terror on a Train (6 a.m.), a 1953 Glen Ford thriller about a bomb on a train that sounds like an inspiration for Source Code. It hasn’t been released on home video anywhere. Down Three Dark Streets (3:15 p.m.), from 1954 and currently available on a limited-edition MGM disc, is a stylish detective story with interweaving narratives; and 1955’s Joe Macbeth (4:45 p.m.) may be the most unusual of them all, a retelling of Macbeth in a modern gangster setting that hasn’t been released on any video format.

Other interesting screenings of films not on DVD include Sam Fuller’s western Run of the Arrow (4:30 p.m. Nov. 21) and Arthur Hiller’s ‘60s comedy Penelope (10 a.m. Nov. 25), with Natalie Wood and Peter Falk.

In order to appreciate the latest triumph by Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, The Skin I Live In (La Piel que Habito), two things are necessary: eyes and heart. No need for thick skin, unless you are sensitive to surrealism, non-linear plots, sharp razors and the color red -- as in blood.

The eyes will follow a brilliant plastic surgeon/scientist (Antonio Banderas) carefully monitor every progress and setback of his latest experiment: Vera (Elena Anaya). This is the name of the beautiful young woman of flawless skin whom Dr. Robert Ledgard keeps locked inside one of the rooms in his remote Toledo palace-like home. He watches her sleep, read and practice yoga from his room using a giant TV screen. Agile and flexible, in body and mind, Vera glows even when no indication of a possible release is given to her.

Nobody knows of her existence except Ledgard and his housekeeper/assistant, Marilia (Marisa Paredes, who doesn't seem to age). Even fewer know of her origin. Almodóvar is in no rush to explain everything at once. Ultimately he gives in and hands us the real story here, piece by piece, wrapped in surgical blue in the same unapologetic manner Ledgard crafts a full-body skin.

To the sounds of anxious violins and other dramatic tunes, we meet other eccentric characters and learn all about Vera's origin -- and herein lies the incredible shock. It will take you a couple of seconds – a minute in my case -- to process what Almodóvar has just thrown your way.

It is not just the combination of Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face (minus the carnival music) and Thierry Jonquet's novel Tarantula, but so much more. What this more constitutes depends on who is watching. Almost every object shown in the film has an elegant quality to it, not just the obvious long white stairs. Eroticism and sensuality are brought on by Vera's yoga poses and the flesh-tone body suit defining her delicate figure. There is also humor, albeit in odd spots. You may catch yourself laughing at scenes that, normally, are traumatic.

"The things a madman's love can do,” Marilia, the assistant, is seen saying as she narrates the tragic past events that lead us to the present. With a wife burned in a car accident and a daughter raped, Banderas's character is no stranger to tragedy. He knows a violent unfortunate event does not end with the extinguishing of the fire or the rescuing.

That is merely the beginning and has no comparison to the trauma that sets in later. He knows this well because his wife and daughter could not bear it. He is hoping to give Vera a skin that is thicker and better, in every sense.

Here Banderas is scariest when silent. And although he appears more charming handling his mother tongue, the cold calm precision with which he walks, talks and carries himself is chilling. His character is a man of actions, not so much of words, and absolutely zero hesitations.

But even after all has been disclosed, he does not quite become Dr. Frankenstein. Not to me. Just as it is not fair to classify the film as simply horror. Follow the trail of revenge, of undeserving horrific actions and reactions and you will find a very familiar face: a man in pain who asked for none of it to happen but to whom it happened anyway. He has very little left and will not risk losing it again, even if that makes him a monster.

Of the two things needed to understand this psychological drama, your eyes will be the first to condemn him and execute him. But in your heart, you will understand his sickness.

LA PIEL QUE HABITO (THE SKIN I LIVE IN). Starring: Antonio Banderas, Elena Anaya, Marisa Paredes. Directed by Pedro Almodóvar. Rated: R. In Spanish with English subtitles. Now playing at: Regal Shadowood 16 and Cinemark Palace 20 in Boca Raton, Regal Delray Beach 18 and Cinemark Boynton Beach and Coral Gables Art Cinema.

Most Americans who are aware of Serge Gainsbourg know him from the curiously controversial recording of Je T’Aime . . . Moi Non Plus, a steamy slice of aural sex he made in the 1960s with his then-lover, Jane Birkin.

It is enough to turn anyone interested in knowing more about this enigmatic Frenchman who was a giant on the European pop music scene. Now comes screenwriter-director Joann Sfar to offer a biography of the man, called Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life, a film as audacious as the subject himself.

As she shows, Gainsbourg was a precocious child, played winningly by 13-year-old Kacey Mottet-Klein, and he grew up to an even more precocious adult. The movie takes a similar tone, representing his personal demons at life-size human puppets, both scary and whimsical. Mottet-Klein soon gives way to Eric Elmosnino as the grown Gainsbourg, with a charismatic performance that won him the Cesar, France’s version of the Oscar.

Despite his diminutive size, Gainsbourg was able to attract and bed many beautiful women, including Birkin (with whom he fathered the haunting actress Charlotte Gainsbourg), Marianne Faithfull and Brigitte Bardot. The film is more impressionistic than factually accurate, but that allows Sfar and Elmosnino the latitude to reach for emotional truths. Gainsbourg was a contradiction of opposite qualities and the film about his life is all the more dramatically compelling because of that.

GAINSBOURG. Director: Joann Sfar; Cast: Eric Elmosino, Lucy Gordon, Laetitia Casta, Juliette Greco, Kacey Mottet-Klein; Distributor: Music Box Films; in French with English subtitles. Playing in area theaters.

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Ever since he burst onto the international cinema scene in 1999 with the manically paced in-triplicate Run Lola Run, German filmmaker Tom Tykwer has been a unique voice whose career has been well worth following. (I am even a big fan of his Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, a distinctly minority opinion.)

He strayed into commercial territory with The International, a so-so finance/arms deal shoot-’em-up two years ago, but now returns to his independent film roots with a microscopic examination of a contemporary menage a trois, called simply and pointedly 3.

At its center is a Berlin couple in their unglamorous 40s, Hanna and Simon, who have been together for two decades, but their relationship is starting to unravel due to career pressures, health crises and mere boredom. By sheer coincidence, they each meet genetics engineer Adam and they each are drawn into a sexual relationship with him, an out-of-character impulse for each of them. When the three of them move in together, the complications increase exponentially, but they are modern, mature Germans, so they are each confident of being able to handle the arrangement.

Two of Tykwer’s skills are in casting and in restraining a situation which had the potential to drift into the lurid. Sophie Rois anchors the film as solemn Hanna, Sebastian Schipper (Simon) goes through a figurative rebirth after a testicular cancer scare, and Devid Striesow is coolly inscrutable as aptly named Adam, androgynous and amenable to all possibilities. Tykwer brings in current events, today’s Berlin and a distracting multi-screen technique, all of which probably work against the shelf life of 3, but at the moment, it makes for engrossing viewing.

3. Director: Tom Tykwer; Cast: Devid Striesow, Sophie Rois, Sebastian Schipper. Distributor: Strand; in German with English subtitles. Playing at the Mos’Art Theatre, Lake Park.

Director-screenwriter Dito Montiel (A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, Fighting) grew up in the low-income housing projects of Queens, N.Y. Many of the guys that he grew up with are now either in prison or dead, yet through sheer determination he avoided both and became a filmmaker.

How did he beat the odds and avoid the violence that he recreates in his latest feature, The Son of No One, opening in area theaters this weekend? “Man, you know, fear. And I really love it,” he says of making movies. Typical of his tenacity was his early efforts at playing with a rock band. “We taught ourselves and we were so bad, we had to make our own songs, because we weren’t good enough to play anyone else’s songs.

“So the notion of doing things myself has been there since I’m a kid, only because nobody would ever give me anything. And then after a whole bunch of strange circumstances, I ended up making movies.”

The Son of No One is a gritty thriller about a second-generation cop (Channing Tatum, who has starred in all three of Montiel’s movies) who finds himself in over his head when assigned to re-open a double homicide cold case from his Queens neighborhood. The more he investigates, the closer he comes to a dark secret about himself.

Although much fictionalized, the story comes from Montiel’s recollections of growing up in the projects. As he recalls, “We used to hang out in a guy’s apartment there, practicing in a band. We were 14, just screaming into amplifiers.

“There was a guy Hankie, he was about 18-19. He used to really terrorize us because he was older. He just used to smoke crack and never leave,” says Montiel. “One day, somebody killed him. He was dead in the hallway and I remember the police taking him away. As awful as this sounds, we were kind of relieved, y’know?

“A lot of terrible things happened, but we really believed that no one cared what happened inside these walls.”

Although The Son of No One was made on a shoestring budget, Montiel’s screenplay was able to attract an A-list cast, including Oscar winners Al Pacino and Juliette Binoche, as well Katie Holmes, Ray Liotta and Tracy Morgan.

How in the world did he gather such a cast? “It’s bananas, right? It’s like you write your silly craziness in the middle of the night and then you put it out there and you pray,” says Montiel.

Tatum signed on first, from an informal pitch from Montiel while they were making Fighting. “We were doing a movie together and we’re friends, so I thought of him from the beginning. He was a star, but not a big enough star to get the movie made at the time. Thank God for ‘Dear John,’ ” a 2010 surprise hit romance, “and now he’s off and running.”

Next came Holmes, drawn to play Tatum’s wife by the couple of juicy dramatic moments she has. And then came The Phone Call.

“John Burnam, who is Al Pacino’s agent, called up and said, ‘Al would like to meet you.’ I said, ‘Are you kidding me? You say where and when, man,’ and I ran.” From the start, Montiel had wanted Pacino for the former lead detective on the case. So he sent him a script, but never expected to ever hear back from him.

“I mean, who does? That’s the top of the world, y’know?.” says Montiel. “Everyone plays Lotto, no one thinks they’re gonna win.

“Al loves to act, and luckily he saw something in my screenplay that he could do special, and I certainly think he did.” For very little money, “he was shooting our movie in the morning, turning 70 and doing Shakespeare in the Park at night.”

Pacino has a reputation for being demanding and difficult, but Montiel insists he saw none of that. “The first day, we only had a couple of hours to do one of his really long scenes with the kid. It was literally five pages just of him talking and the little boy listening.

“He shows up and I was begging the first assistant director, ‘We need more than two hours for this. This is crazy. This is Al Pacino, it’s his first day.’ He said, ‘That’s all we got. We’re on a tight schedule.’ So Al shows up and he says, ‘Can I do one rehearsal?’ I said, ‘Of course.’ He did it and he literally missed only two words. I’m not a stickler for words, but he apologized, ‘I think I missed two words.’ He was just the best.”

Although he is still something of a novice at directing, Montiel was able to gain Pacino’s respect and cooperation. “I come as a fan. I think maybe that helped, that I don’t try to pretend that I know more than him,” he says. “I just enjoy watching him and then I’d ask him to try something, and luckily he did.

“It’s such a small movie,” Montiel says of The Son of No One. “Even though is has a lot of stars, everyone really stepped in and did it for nothing. We shot it in 24 days. We got to make something we really liked.

“The hardest thing? It’s all hard, I guess. I’m pretty new in the (film) world, but from what I hear, it’s tougher and tougher to make movies that you write, that don’t have cars blowing up and things like that.

“You just hope that you can make something that you feel really good about, and I feel really good about this,” says Montiel. “The hardest thing is to make something you feel good about.”

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An average police procedural drama elevated by an attention-getting cast, The Son of No One moves back and forth between 1986, when a young boy in the Queensboro Projects accidentally kills two low-lifes, and today, when his long-buried secret begins to surface. Writer-director Dito Montiel knows how to deliver the grime of the streets he grew up on and he knows how to pull good histrionic performances from his cast, but the story he tells never fully washes and nor does it rise above typical television fare.

Still, the Sundance Film Festival-screened release is worth a look, if only for the scenery-chewing work of the likes of Al Pacino as lead detective on the case and the cover-up, Katie Holmes as the agitated wife of the young killer, now grown and a cop himself, and comic Tracy Morgan in a dead-serious turn as the grown, but emotionally stunted, eyewitness to the shootings.

At the center of the film is perp-turned-cop Jonathan White (Channing Tatum, the least of the high-powered cast), who cannot shake his past, and Ray Liotta as his precinct captain, a little too eager to sweep matters under the rug. The movie looks aptly gritty, but expect to be ahead of the story and expect it to break at regular intervals for commercials.

THE SON OF NO ONE. Director: Dito Montiel; Cast: Al Pacino, Channing Tatum, Katie Holmes, Ray Liotta, Tracy Morgan, Juliette Binoche; Distributor: Anchor Bay; Rated: R; Showing: In area theaters beginning Friday.

Why do filmmakers continue to adapt Hunter S. Thompson’s unfilmable pseudojournalism into movies? Critics and audiences alike lambasted the Thompson adaptations Where the Buffalo Roam and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but that hasn’t prevented the green-lighting of The Rum Diary, a screen version of Thompson’s first published novel, about a freelance journalist’s misadventures in Puerto Rico at the dawn of the ‘60s.

The faithful movie version of Fear and Loathing worked, to some extent, because director Terry Gilliam had an uncompromising artistic vision; his customary bravura style of Bunuelian surrealism trumped a narrative that was justly dismissed as eye-rolling, drug-glorifying juvenilia. This time, Bruce Robinson, the cult director behind such ‘90s British imports as Withnail and I and How to Get Ahead in Advertising, does his best to inject some personal touches of deadpan wit into a project that is, for all intents and purposes, Johnny Depp’s.

A friend of Thompson’s, Depp was so intent on playing one of the writer’s surrogates for the second time that he all but paid for this film’s production out of pocket after it failed to make it past the development stage twice before. It’s easy to see why. The Rum Diary is an overlong progression of forgettable nihilism – a narcissistic vanity project that focuses once again on the author’s incessant drug life to the detriment of what could have been an interesting story.

As the gonzo writer Paul Kemp, Depp doubles down on his Thompson impression from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, only this time without the motley attire. He still speaks in clipped, staccato sentences, his face conveying a perpetual state of hangover. He begins the film by emerging from the boozy cocoon of his trashed hotel room in San Juan for a job interview with a fictional island newspaper.

The scenes in the newsroom – the kind of clangorous, sepia-toned, smoke-filled writers’ hovels we remember from old movies – are the best ones in The Rum Diary. The dialogue is hilarious, the atmosphere is kinetic and Richard Jenkins steals many scenes as a harried editor in an awful toupee: “You’re not, uh … artistic, are you?” he asks Kemp, prying about the man’s sexuality.

Kemp is unhappy at his new job, relegated to writing horoscopes and covering bowling alleys for his paper, a vapid rag tailored to moneyed tourists. His proposals for serious investigate pieces rejected, Kemp eventually falls under the spell of dapper industrialist Sanderson (Aaron Eckhart) and his sex-bomb wife Chenault (Amber Heard). Kemp desires the latter, so he gets into financial bed with the former, accepting his offer to promote the building of a skyscraper hotel on another island – a move that would crush the civilizations of its local islanders and turn pristine land into another tourist playground and tax haven.

Sanderson lives in a billion-dollar compound with a yacht, a private beach and sports cars galore, and has constructed an invisible force field between his luxurious accommodations and the teeming masses of peasants rioting for a living wage immediately outside.

I’d like to think The Rum Diary has a social and political conscience, that it has a soul of some kind. Occasionally, I was bowled over by its intelligence: Watching the 1960 presidential debate on television, Kemp wittily rebukes Richard Nixon (one of Thompson’s lifelong arch-nemeses), then astutely articulates that, decades later, radicals will have infiltrated the government so successfully that Nixon would be considered a liberal. This kind of talk isn’t just the work of a clever screenwriter throwing out red meat for a modern liberal audience who has lived through exactly this prophecy; Thompson really did speak these opinions when no one else did, and his words continue to resonate beyond his grave.

Unfortunately, these aren’t the words that consume most of The Rum Diary. The source material is far less eloquent, and eventually the movie falls under the languor of the hallucinogens its characters absorb, crushing its momentum. We see a bit too much of Giovanni Ribisi’s obnoxious Moburg – the newspaper’s squirrelly voiced, Hitler-admiring addict ­– and the story becomes bogged down in drug trips and cockfights.

The legitimacy of Thompson’s groundbreaking, industry-altering journalism is once again eschewed in favor of sensationalistic escapades that wouldn’t be out of place on The Dukes of Hazzard, if it were directed by Roger Corman. Nobody gets shorter shrift in this self-indulgent male fantasy than Amber Heard, whose only apparent direction was to look and sound objectified. She has the depth of a thimble and, much as I’d love to believe otherwise, the movie does, too.

THE RUM DIARY. Director: Bruce Robinson; Cast: Johnny Depp, Aaron Eckhart, Michael Rispoli, Amber Heard, Richard Jenkins, Giovanni Ribisi; Studio: FilmDistrict; Rating: R; Opens: Friday at most commercial houses