Bunuel

Stanley Kubrick's biographer turns here to another secretive, obsessive film director: Luis Buñuel (1900-83), creator of such bourgeois-baiting masterpieces as An Andalusian Dog, Viridiana, and Belle de Jour. Making good use of family documents and with the cooperation of Buñuel's son, John Baxter explores the autobiographical roots of the perverse eroticism and lucid, almost cruelly detached view of the human comedy that distinguished the Spanish-born director's artistic vision. But the biography is not all surrealism and cynicism: lots of good anecdotes culled from interviews put flesh and blood on Buñuel's austere public persona.