Longing for short films? Tour answers call.
If not for festivals, the Independent Film Channel, and a few moments on every Academy Awards broadcast, short moviemaking would go completely unnoticed.
The good news is that in recent years, many of the Oscar-nominated shorts tour the country as part of a program assembled and distributed by Apollo Cinema.
The 2005 Oscar shorts package includes three of the five animated nominees, four of the five live-action selections, and the animated winner of the student Academy Award.
All in all, the collection is a mediocre tip of a great big, far more interesting, iceberg. Even so, if you don't anticipate seeing many nonfeatures this year, the eight movies from around the world in this lineup make an adequate sampler.
The best of the bunch are Taika Waititi's ''Two Cars, One Night" from New Zealand, and Chris Landreth's ''Ryan," from Canada.
Waititi's film, a live-action nominee, is black-and-white, and is set in a parking lot where a Maori boy and a Maori girl taunt each other from their respective cars.
It lasts about 13 minutes and probably has one too many sped-up sequences, but it humorously manages to capture a universe of preadolescent attraction, in which boy and girl go from vulgar to sweet.
Their slangy English borders on the impenetrable, but the two have a serious smolder in their faces that lends the movie a lasting mysteriousness.
''Ryan" won the animated-short Oscar. It's more ambitious-looking than the other nominees. (Bill Plympton's ''Guard Dog" and ''Lorenzo," by Mike Gabriel and Baker Bloodworth, are not on the tour.)
Landreth's movie is the only one to feature speaking adults. It's also the only one that uses its form to speculate about the inner workings of the human mind.
The beauty in ''Ryan" comes from the way it prizes candor over goofy tricks, paying attention to sad people and reaching out to rescue them.
Drawn in a psychedelic, three-dimensional world, the film is imagined as a documentary conversation between Landreth and the down-on-his-luck Canadian animator Ryan Larkin, whose innovative work was acclaimed decades ago.
Their faces and bodies are decomposing, but vividly, in a way that suggests a relationship between their physical selves and their doubting self-images.
Larkin's wasting away doubles as a comment on his later career. As a reminder of Larkin's greatness, Landreth talks to Larkin's friends, who are conceived as more fully drawn characters, and he includes some of Larkin's films from the late 1960s and '70s. The wistfulness in ''Ryan" is a touching surprise.
This year's live-action winner was Andrea Arnold's ''Wasp," and it's the sort of handheld-camera doozy that calls to mind the grungy work of Belgium's Dardenne brothers, best known here for 1999's ''Rosetta."
''Wasp" is about Zoe, a 23-year-old single English mother of four, and her decision to park her starving, disheveled tots outside a pub while she picks up a guy she used to have a crush on.
Zoe's single-mindedness is infuriating. But Arnold is determined to look past that and give the film a happy ending.
With ''Million Dollar Baby" winning best picture and ''Wasp" winning best live-action short, you could be tricked into thinking that socially challenging work is being welcomed, and that things might be looking up for other, more confrontational European filmmakers like Lars von Trier, Lukas Moodysson, and the Dardennes. But you know better than that.
If you're looking for other opportunities to see more shorts, the Independent Film Festival of Boston starts on April 21.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com.
