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Every breakout independent hit seems like a miracle. This delightful ‘little’ picture was fated to be ghetto-ized into ethnic theaters before its producers opted to distribute it themselves. Capturing a vibrant part of the immigrant experience, Joan Micklin Silver’s micro-production often has a big-picture look; it charmed audiences and became a sleeper success. Star Carol Kane was nominated for an acting Oscar as ‘Gitl,’ a woman with Old-Country values plus the grit and determination to win a better life. Also with fine performances from Steven Keats, Mel Howard, Dorrie Kavanaugh and Doris Roberts.

Hester Street

Blu-ray

Cohen Media Group / Kino Lorber

1975 / B&w / 1:85 anamorphic 16:9 / 90 min. / Street Date March 8, 2022 / Available from Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Carol Kane, Steven Keats, Mel Howard, Dorrie Kavanaugh, Doris Roberts, Stephen Strimpell, Lauren Frost, Paul Freedman, Martin Garner.

Cinematography: Kenneth Van Sickle

Production Designer: Stuart Wurtzel

Film Editor: Katherine Wenning

Original Music: Herbert L. Clarke...

Joan Micklin Silver, the trailblazing director behind “Hester Street” and “Crossing Delancey,” died on Thursday in Manhattan due to vascular dementia, her daughter Claudia Silver told the New York Times. She was 85.

Silver was outspoken about her experiences confronting sexism, misogyny and anti-Semitism within the entertainment industry.

“I came of age for film at a time when sexism was pretty strong. And although I could get work as a writer, I couldn’t get work as a director at all. And I had the experience of watching young men who had made shorts as I had, prize-winning shorts as I had, moving on to directing films and I couldn’t do it,” Silver said in a 2005 interview with the Directors Guild of America.

In 1975, she wrote and directed the indie film “Hester Street,” a low-budget production based on Abraham Cahan’s novella “Yekl” about a young Jewish couple who emigrated...

©Paramount Pictures

“My momma always said, .Life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get..” That line was immortalized by Tom Hanks in the award-winning movie “Forest Gump” in 1994. Librarian of Congress James H. Billington today selected that film and 24 others to be preserved as cultural, artistic and historical treasures in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress.

Spanning the period 1912-1994, the films named to the registry include Hollywood classics, documentaries, animation, home movies, avant-garde shorts and experimental motion pictures. Representing the rich creative and cultural diversity of the American cinematic experience, the selections range from Walt Disney.s timeless classic “Bambi” and Billy Wilder.s “The Lost Weekend,” a landmark film about the devastating effects of alcoholism, to a real-life drama between a U.S. president and a governor over the desegregation of the University of Alabama. The selections also...

I’m never one to put significant stock in the film-based choices made by any kind of committee — be it an awards group, critics circle, soup kitchen line, etc. — but the National Film Registry is a little different. Not that they’re any different than those aforementioned organization types, but because the government assemblage preserves works deemed “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.” No small potatoes.

Their latest list — created for both public awareness and the opportunity to grumble, as I’ll do in a second — has been unveiled, and the selections are none too out-of-left-field. The biggest of these 25 would have to be Forrest Gump, a choice I fully understand but completely disagree with on an opinion and moral scale. The only other true objection I can raise is toward El Mariachi, film school-level junk from a director whose finest works are the direct result of working with those more talented.

You needn't be a black T-shirted Apple dweeb to enjoy The Social Network, says John Patterson. And if it is made up – as some are claiming – so what?

So Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was right after all: The Social Network is fiction.

Which is just as well for Zuckerberg, who, with all his nerdy genius, social autism and Nixonian levels of resentment, is the subject of just about the least flattering biopic of a still-living figure since Raging Bull 30 years ago. Back then, the half-forgotten Jake Lamotta was only too glad of a few talkshow appearances and some walking-around money. Zuckerberg, who has no need of money, must bridle at being viewed retrospectively – which is to say, like a dead person – so the liberties that screenwriter Aaron Sorkin has taken with the Facebook/Zuckerberg story, along with the Rashomon-style competing and contradictory legal depositions on which much of the material is based,...