Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her

Garcia's debut as writer/director comprises five vignettes touching on the lives of various women - a doctor, a tarot card reader and her girlfriend, a bank manager, a single mother, a police detective and her blind sister - living in the San Fernando Valley. Unusually and impressively for a former cameraman, Garcia excels at eliciting strong performances throughout and maintaining a consistent mood (despite the inevitably variable quality of the slight stories) poised delicately between wry comedy and more serious contemplation of contemporary American female lives.