Del Toro is one of the most popular Mexican directors of recent years, and in this book, he delivers an experience “akin to bouncing around inside his hallucinatory brain,” John Williams wrote in The Times. There are dense illustrations from notebooks for “Hellboy” and “Pan’s Labyrinth,” as well as pictures of del Toro’s Bleak House, where he works. The director said that his intention in releasing the book was to “open my process a little bit more” and inspire aspiring filmmakers to “embrace your passions wholeheartedly, obsessively, and enshrine images, collect them and study them as a code.”

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THE CLASSICAL MEXICAN CINEMA

The Poetics of the Exceptional Golden Age Films

By Charles Ramírez Berg

254 pp. University of Texas Press. (2015)

This book covers the golden age of Mexican cinema, which lasted from the mid-1930s to the late 1950s and included the work of directors like the surrealist Luis Buñuel (who was a Spaniard, but spent much of his adult life in Mexico) and Enrique Rosas, who made the classic silent film “El Automóvil Gris.” Ramírez Berg explores the roots of the industry and explains how filmmakers of the time crafted a style that was distinctly Mexican.

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OBJECTS OF DESIRE

Conversations With Luis Buñuel

By Jose de la Colina and Tomas Perez Turrent

Edited and translated by Paul Lenti

262 pp. Marsilio. (1993)