Joan Micklin Silver made [Hester Street] with a script she adapted from a story by Abraham Cahan. It is utterly sincere and utterly abysmal. It's shot in poorly lighted black and white, the sound track is so flat it sounds as if it had been steamrollered, the camera use and editing would do little credit to a second-year film student, and the cast … is notable only for its memory of acting clichés….

Hester Street looks like one of those Films from Great Literature made for educational film catalogues, and is not even a very good example of that questionable genre.

Considerable advance fuss has been made about Silver because she has bucked the System to make and to release her film. That's important, truly worth celebration. But to let the congratulations spill over on to the film that resulted from her independence would be ludicrous. (p. 21)

Stanley...