For most film-makers shorts are a calling card, a way into the industry (witness Scorsese's celebrated 60s work). But most leave the form behind in the graduation to features, occasionally getting close again for a pop-promo or, horror of horrors, advert. Those of sufficient stature clinging tenaciously to both camps are arguably few enough to count on the fingers of one hand - the late Derek Jarman, Peter Greenaway, maybe Jonathan Demme. And Hal Hartley.

If we see (and it's not hard) the young director's work as an on-going work-in-progress, then this package of three short films made between his best, Trust (1990), and the most recent, Simple Men (1992), is as valid and invigorating as any of the features: films that "can achieve a fullness of expression and execution, while still being essentially sketchy."

Surviving Desire, the longest at almost an hour, is "less a love story than it is a story of love in bad faith." Quintessential Hartley - shot in primary colours, littered with non-naturalistic, frequently hysterical dialogue between the sparring characters, dripping in literary allusion. Hartley regular Martin Donovan is Jude, a young English Lit. lecturer whose teaching of Dostoevsky is hooked on an obsession with one passage from The Brothers Karamazov and female student, Rebecca Nelson. Hartley claims the film (made for US TV) is allowed to "fall apart" at the end, but in doing so teaches a valiant lesson: as someone says - "Ignorance is the necessary condition of human happiness." Freed from the "narrative arc" of his features, the writer/director even finds room in here for a wonderful little music-less dance routine. A real gem.

The remaining two pieces are far more abstract, less narrative even than Surviving Desire. Ambition borrows from Hartley's regard for the grand old man of experimental Jean-Luc Godard; a brief, absurd account of a bored young man determined to be a success with his career and women. "I want to be awed by my own accomplishments." Surrealist, bizarre, with extensive use of slow-motion and parody; at once apart from, and intrinsically part of Hartley's oeuvre.

Slightly longer, Theory of Achievement visits an inane bunch of suburban Brooklynites balancing their artistic and creative conceits against the financial realities of everyday life. Can there be a theory of achievement? The dialogue is always pretentious - verging on preposterous - while Hartley off-sets any potential intellectual extravagance by having a song about winning the lottery (played on an accordion) delivered straight to camera.

At under 80 minutes, Three Shorts is never less than the product of a very droll, idiosyncratic imagination. Almost Generation X's retort to Jim Jarmusch. Seen against his longer work, they allow Hartley a more testing, less organised canvass, without restraints of budget or even appreciable commercial success. Since completing Simple Men and before the as-yet-unseen Amateur, the workaholic film-maker has wrapped a new piece called Flirt.