Hester Street: dir Joan Micklin Silver (1975)

Carol Kane is extraordinary as a Jewish immigrant arriving in late 19th-century New York with her young son Yossele (Paul Freedman) to join a husband (Steven Keach) who she hasn’t seen in three years. He’s embraced the new world and regards his wife as a throwback to a culture that he desperately wants to forget; she finds it hard to adapt to the new life, too attached to the traditions of her former community to envelop herself fully in New York’s modernity. It could’ve been gloomy, the underbelly f the Gilded Age, but in fact it’s an entertaining and humorous film that earned Kane an Oscar nomination.