German producer Regina Ziegler commissioned the first six Erotic Tales in 1994, intending the medium-budget, half-hour shorts for distribution at film festivals and European television. Every few years since, Ziegler has produced another set, racking up big TV ratings and winning awards at international fests. The three samples selected as an Erotic Tales "best-of"–Susan Seidelman's The Dutch Master, Jos Stelling's The Waiting Room, and Amos Kollek's Angela–are practically designed to wow festival crowds. They're light, sexy, and cast with recognizable actors, so when wedged between the grubby abstractions and amateurish shock-comedy that often turns up on shorts programs, the poise and polish of Erotic Tales tend to impress. Out of that context, though, their attempts at wit seem forced, and the overall point of each installment is too minor to spend nearly 30 minutes exploring. Seidelman's 1993 effort is the clumsiest of the trio. Mira Sorvino stars in The Dutch Master as a New York dental hygienist who becomes obsessed with a Pieter De Hooch painting at the Metropolitan Museum Of Art and imagines a life inside the artwork. Seidelman gets some juice out of the layers of voyeurism in her story, especially once Sorvino enters the painting and goes from watcher to watched. But the decision to have Sorvino's boss, fiancé, parents, and friends narrate the film, documentary-style, adds too heavy a coat of silliness. The working-class Italian-American stereotypes pile up quickly, somewhat smugly forcing the audience to identify with the artistically curious Sorvino over her loutish relations. Stelling's The Waiting Room has a more manageable premise, albeit one that can't fill the 1996 short's required running time. Eugène Bervoets plays a middle-aged man who leers at every woman he lays eyes on in a train station, until one takes his silent invitation and engages in a public lap dance. The bump and grind makes for one of the few genuinely erotic moments in Erotic Tales, but the piece's comic tone siphons off almost all heft. Only Kollek's 2000 short Angela really succeeds in being rich and surprising enough to merit inclusion in a best-of anthology. Thuggish character actor Victor Argo plays a morose septuagenarian who confesses to therapist Austin Pendleton that he fears not only that he'll never have the opportunity to have sex again, but that his body wouldn't respond if the chance came. When he keeps running into a coquettish neighbor (Valerie Geffner), Argo starts getting into shape for a possible romantic encounter. Revelations about himself and his community ensue, in a plot that twists and eventually disappears with the penetrating ambiguity of a good short story. It's the only compelling "tale" here, erotic or otherwise.