Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her (Rodrigo Gracia, 2000)

Five loosely connected vignettes of women in Los Angeles, this is a product of quality as uneven as its range of acting talent, which goes from Glenn Close and Holly Hunter at one end to Cameron Diaz and Calista Flockhart at the other, with nothing in between. The latter two are given the most contrived characters, respectively a pontificating blind woman and a lesbian fortune-teller with a terminally ill partner, signalling the director's lack of confidence in their ability to sustain interest without props, and their episodes are accordingly of little interest. The only story with real legs in a male director's rather blatant attempt to make a gesture for wimmin is the Holly Hunter one, where she plays a bank manager seeking an abortion who is repeatedly accosted by a pushy homeless woman. The rest is largely unexplored and therefore remains inconsequential chaff, even if scattered with a few perceptive touches.

5/10