TODD Solondz is American cinema's harbinger of doom and gloom, part Cassandra, part Prospero, always tackling uncomfortable issues in an even more uncomfortable way in a world where everyone loses.

Never was a film more diametrically opposed to its title than Happiness, his taboo-shattering dark satire, and Storytelling is another gleefully malignant antidote to the American Dream. Or rather, two antidotes, because Solondz has essayed two separate stories, Fiction and Nonfiction, each one a self-contained sleazy novella.

It would be better to describe them as uneven fragments rather than complete works, but that only adds to Solondz's dissatisfaction with everything around him.

The short, sharp and shock-tactic Fiction assaults politically correct attitudes to race, sexuality and disability in its blunt, brutal account of student/teacher relationships as a bored, vindictive black tutor works his way through his impressionable creative writing students after hours.

This is a loathsome and self-loathing America, with Selma Blair and Robert Wisdom being deliberately cold in their depiction of hip student Vi and her embittered Pullitzer Prize-winning professor.

In Nonfiction, an aspiring if inadequate filmmaker (Paul Giamatti) unexpectedly hits on his big chance. The subject of his glib study of teenage behaviour - high-school drop-out Scooby, from a cartoon middle-class suburbia patrolled by John Goodman - turns out to be even more of a geek than he is: a dope-head descendant of Peter Sellers's gardener in Being There.

Armchair America laps up Scooby's unintentional, infantile humour; Solondz feels only contempt, this more misanthropic Woody Allen even mocking American Beauty's sensibilities.