It’s no surprise that “Eros,” a trio of short films by Wong Kar-Wai, Steven Soderbergh, and Michelangelo Antonioni is something of a mixed bag. The omnibus format is, on the whole, omnibusted, though every now and then it allows the theatrical release of a major work. As a card-carrying member of the “Wong can do no wrong cult,” I’d give that distinction to “The Hand,” 40 minutes of swooning retro romanticism in the vein of that director’s “Days of Being Wild,” “In the Mood for Love,” and “2046.”

I’ve heard griping that Mr. Wong is starting to repeat himself. I suppose it’s true: “The Hand” is another rapt memory-trip with gorgeous actors in stunning attire, lusher-than-lush production design, mesmerizing cinematography, astoundingly inventive montage, and masterly mise-en-scene. One of the most exquisite sensibilities at work in the movies has lit up the screen again. Yeah, what a total drag.

Chang Chen stars as Zhang, an apprentice tailor of quipao gowns – those skin-tight, funnel-necked wonderments that made Maggie Cheung into one of the most glamorous celluloid sirens since Marlene Dietrich shimmied into her tux. His main client is a haughty courtesan named Miss Hua (a ravishing Gong Li). On his first visit to her lavish suite of rooms, Zhang is made to wait in the foyer while Miss Hua satisfies her afternoon client.

Ever the master of off-screen space, Mr. Wong makes us eavesdrop with the tailor as he sits outside her bedroom. The medium-shot composition suggests the surrealist living room from “Twin Peaks” transplanted into “Time Regained”; then, in an extraordinary shift of perspective, the camera flips point of view with a mirror hanging on the wall so that Zhang, full of yearning, looks straight into our eyes. Thick with such tricky spatial relationships, “The Hand” is a poem of erotic triangulation between Zhang, Hua, and the audience itself.

Miss Hua emerges from her boudoir and slinks over to Zhang, her eye on the bulge in his trousers. She slides his pants down, reaches between his legs, and whispers: “Remember this feeling and you’ll make beautiful clothes.” Zhang doesn’t forget. There soon materializes a flabbergasting quipao drenched in obsidian embroidery.

Floating on a current of a woozy eroticism, “The Hand” follows several years of Zhang’s infatuation with Miss Hua as her fortunes ebb. Had it come out of nowhere, this decadent, luxurious miniature would raise a flush on every cinephile on the planet. As a gloss on the “quipao trilogy” of “Days,” “Mood,” and “2046,” it posits Zhang’s sensuous form-giving art as an analogue to Mr. Wong’s. No one who cares for the movies will miss it.

If nothing else, we have Mr. Soderbergh to thank for the release of “Eros.” His relationship with Warner Brothers (read: the bucket of money he’s made them) secured a release through the studio’s “independent” division. Alas, his ambitions for “Equilibrium” can be summed up in his press kit “Director’s Statement,” which reads, in its entirety: “I wanted to be on a poster with Michelangelo Antonioni.” That he has achieved.

Robert Downey Jr. stars as a noir-era advertising executive (Nick Penrose) undergoing analysis with a distracted shrink (Alan Arkin). While Nick describes his recurring erotic dream, Dr. Pearl peeps on some unseen attraction outside the window. The counterpoint between Nick’s confession and Mr. Arkin’s increasingly manic voyeurism is evidently meant to tickle, but this witless scenario feels entirely tossed off.

Whatever Mr. Antonioni tosses off is worthy of respect, no matter how loony. I suspect we may look back with endearment on his disconcertingly retrograde short “The Dangerous Thread of Things,” and find it daringly simple rather than embarrassingly simple-minded. Or maybe not: “desultory Eurotrash horndogerry” sneered Variety, not without justification, when “Eros” premiered at the Venice Film Festival. More recently, a critic friend of mine e-mailed to say she found it hilarious, “exactly like bad ’60s softcore.”

It isn’t supposed to be funny, but the somnambulistic drift of the narrative does have a certain old-school Marienbadish charm. If you can get past the risibly stilted performances, forgive an inept sex scene, and erase the super corny climax from your memory, “The Dangerous Thread” plays like a fairly passable trance film, something a lesser Italian disciple of Maya Deren might work up for a thesis project.

Wooden Christopher Buchholz (Christopher) and topless Regina Nemni (Cloe) star as a loveless couple who pass an afternoon staring at Symbolic Landscapes while Failing To Communicate. A mysterious woman (Luisa Ranieri) gallops bareback along the shore. Lunch is rendered fathomlessly something or other by enigmatic camera movements. The couple vanishes into an anatomically suggestive thicket.

Bending over backward, it’s possible to defend the atrocious acting as an (inadvertently) effective distancing device, another wrinkle in a purposefully abstract texture. But it doesn’t take much of a stretch to find this dangerously silly film the equivalent of an avant-garde Mentos commercial.