The problem with short films is that you nearly always see them in collections. I remember at the Dublin Film Festival seeing a whole day of shorts, mainly local ones, that the only ones that really stuck out were the really ropey ones. A good short is often subtle, quirky, clever. A shit short is usually tedious, obvious and badly acted.
Coffee And Cigarettes is a collection of similarly themed Jim Jarmusch shorts filmed in black and white with various famous and semi famous actors. They all take place as chats over coffee and ciggies, usually on slightly surreal topics (Tom Waits and the RZA revealing their other lives as emergency doctors f’rinstance). Problem is eleven very similar shorts over an hour and ahalf get rather boring. Visually they are not all that interesting and beyond the celeb spotting the segments rarely have even a basic storyline (the Alfred Molina Steve Coogan one would have been good if Spider-Man had not made Molina a bigger star). The film is only good as its worse segment (a really clunky girl reading a gun magazine bit) which means the whole is rather clunky.