But Buñuel's mastery includes a timeless ease with comedy. (In his seventies he made the leap to total disunity of plot with Phantom of Liberty (1974) and turned his usual anti-Catholic and anti-bourgeois antics into disarmingly nonchalant vaudeville.) If Solondz wants to go on experimenting he could use a surer comic touch. The "Nonfiction" section of Storytelling features his best work yet in this vein but also has the strangest fluctuations. Paul Giamatti is wonderfully, painfully adept networking on the phone with a girl he knew in high school, and his bathroom encounter with the stoned Mark Webber is priceless. (Giamatti, as the filmmaker who unconvincingly insists that he does like the human subjects of his movie, clearly stands in for Solondz trying to work out his conflicts.) But funny scenes alternate with overdeliberate little pictograms, of a suburban child's insensitivity to a Salvadoran immigrant housekeeper, for instance, who in her turn seems like a total victim in a Marxist sense, until she turns out to be a murderous psychopath, which zaps our political sympathy but leaves nothing in its place.

In Palindromes Solondz is most securely aware that his style of irony falls toward the comic rather than the tragic end of the scale in the scenes involving Stephen Adly-Guirgis as the pedophile Aviva travels with, particularly the scene in the diner in which he plans, while staring at his plate in despair, what he'll say when asked who Aviva is. There are also some choice gobliny moments with the courtly-horny little Peter Paul Sunshine (Alexander Brickel) who, because of his wayward urges, is the only Christian kid in the movie who seems like a human being.

Possibly the tone gets away from Solondz because storytelling, unfortunately, is not his forte. When you hear the creative-writing-class critiques that the college kids in the "Fiction" section of Storytelling offer of each other's stories it seems likely that Solondz gets paralyzed by trying to anticipate the potential interpretations of his movies. And he's not very good at interpreting his own work--he shoots and talks completely different movies. Take this comment from the About.com interview, for instance: "Nowhere else in the world does this happen and it's hard not to be responsive to it, to this fact that to be an abortionist--like to be a policeman or a fireman--is to take on a heroic profession. You put your life on the line." Heroic sentiments from a man whose four movies can't boast a single heroic figure (i.e., a person who has noble intentions and the unyielding determination and skill to carry them out), even among the secondary characters. (The only exception is when Dawn Wiener rescues her kidnaped sister--in her dreams.)

Solondz was an English major at Yale and in both his interviews and the critique sessions in Storytelling, in which criticism becomes inseparable from spotting offenses against political correctness, the damage is evident. He said to About.com that he follows his "impulses" in developing his stories, but if his scripts derive from impulses that isn't how the finished movies feel. (He told Salon that his actors don't improvise or even rehearse: "[I]t's pretty scripted.") This is perhaps the greatest barrier to his reaching a wide audience as Buñuel so improbably did; having started out as a surrealist seems to have liberated Buñuel permanently from too-programmatic storytelling. If Solondz can't own his penchant for sick-giggly stories enough to make them play onscreen, then he should probably move farther in the direction of his deliberateness and craft more conscious parables to reflect how he thinks he feels about life and art. They might be even less enjoyable, but they would at least be whole.