Steven Rea: This Week's Picks

Embrace of the Serpent Ciro Guerra's profoundly beautiful black-and-white film, set in the dense forests of Colombia, follows two explorers from the West - the German ethnographer Theodor Koch-Grünberg in 1909 and the American biologist Richard Evans Schultes in 1940 - as each encounters the same shaman, the last of his tribe, in the quest for a rare, transformative plant. One of the nominees for best foreign-language film at this year's Academy Awards. Transcendent. Ritz Bourse, no MPAA rating

Farber on Film: The Complete Writings of Manny Farber (Library of America, 824 pp., $29.95) The hugely influential critic, who covered a wide swath of cinema and who coined the term "termite art" (art that "eats its own boundaries"), is celebrated in this comprehensive collection - just about everything he wrote from 1942 to 1977.

Here's Farber riffing on Bogart's The Big Sleep: "The detective's job takes him through Hollywood's underworld, which is made up of a classy crook whose cruelty is limitless, and a down-at-the-heel lot with comic faces and angelic souls. The chief impression you get of their world is that the pay is rotten, the people - especially the women - are uninhibited and no one lives to middle age."

Farber was also among the first to recognize the genius of '40s writer/director Preston Sturges - that is, the first besides Sturges himself.

Scenes of "Anomalisa" Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson (Rizzoli, 64 pp., $30) Choice pages of script, gorgeous full-color production stills, and behind-the-scenes shots, storyboard sketches, and an oddball foreword written by a minor character (the Hotel Fregoli's obliging bellhop) - this companion piece to the Academy Award-nominated animated feature is every bit as sad, strange, and sublime as the film it represents.

A must-have item for anyone who was moved to laughter, to tears, to reconsidering their own place in the world by Kaufman and Johnson and their incredibly emotive puppets.