The Myth of Fingerprints

The characters are sharply etched but the plot is made deliberately ambiguous, suggesting that family life is so emotionally intricate that no single story can contain or explain it.

Has spasms of silliness that thaw things out delightfully. Davis plays Vartan's girlfriend as an irrepressible, sexed-up brat, and gives every line a little hop, skip, and jump.

It's probably not the last word in WASP angst, but it's eloquent, witty, graceful and as sharp as can be.

Less can sometimes be perceived as more, but in the case of The Myth of Fingerprints less is simply less.

An overly mannered film drowning in the symptoms of dysfunction but unable to tap the root causes of this WASPish clan's pain except in the most oblique and cursory ways. This might be Freundlich's point, considering this family deals with its problems through avoidance.

The film has a kind of echo-filled emptiness to it that some will take as profundity and others as mere emptiness.

As Freundlich surely knew, he must have counted, as do we, on the revelation of character to enrich the piece. It doesn't happen. None of the people is particularly interesting, not even the obligatory neurotic, well enough played by Julianne Moore. [6 October 1997, p. 28]