Hester Street: dir Joan Micklin Silver (1975)

Silver’s entertaining debut was an unexpected hit, achieving instant critical acclaim after a screening at the 1975 Cannes Festival. Carol Kane is outstanding as a Jewish immigrant arriving in late 19th-century New York, to live in a tenement apartment on the Lower East Side with a husband who she hadn’t seen in three years. She finds it hard to adapt to the new way of life; he’s embraced the new world and his wife is a throwback to a culture that he desperately wants to forget. Kane is excellent, channelling the film’s melancholy tone while investing her character with a degree of empathy that only heightens the emotion of scenes with a husband who wishes she no longer existed …