Directing: A
Acting: A-
Writing: A-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: A

It’s dumb to start with a personal hangup regarding presentational structure and blurring of narrative mediums, but I guess that’s what I’m doing. Because I must admit, I was rather disappointed to discover today’s installment of Steve McQueen’s “Small Axe” series of “five films,” as he has insisted on calling them—and thus I have regarded them as such—clocked in at merely one hour. This means that three of these so-called “films” have been only an hour or barely more than an hour, making them feel structurally much like television episodes, and had I known that from the start, I would have still watched them all, but with the mindset of television. Not regarding them all as films, I would not have reviewed them.

After the first film, Mangrove, clocked in at just over two hours, only the third film, Red, White and Blue, could even barely be considered “feature length,” at 80 minutes—a run time once reserved for animated features. I keep thinking of Black Mirror, which, though thematically a different thing entirely, was structurally very similar: a relatively small number of episodes per season, each of them a self-contained story, but a couple of them actually stretched toward 75 minutes. That was always regarded as a television show, right? Well, here’s the key difference: as great as many Black Mirror episodes were, Steve McQueen is in a class all his own. He’s redefining what visual storytelling even means, occupying the space between what “movie” and “TV” used to be.

And, as it happened, Red, White and Blue turned out to be the best of the five installments, in my view. And even though the other three titles, Lovers Rock, Alex Wheatle, and now Education all run at only roughly an hour, I find myself thinking Education is actually the second-best of the bunch. And there’s another argument to be had for these shorter run times: McQueen is incredibly efficient with our time. All of these films are so well constructed and edited, I think if movie theaters were actually open and I had gone to one to see even a one-hour title, I would have found it worth the effort. Granted, Red, White and Blue and Edcation would make spectacular companion pieces, at a combined run time of two hours and twenty minutes.

It must also be said, though, that “Small Axe” as a complete set of films is one of the greatest visual experiences of the year. Education serves as the perfect ending, about a young boy of (as usual in these films) West Indian descent who dreams of becoming an astronaut—the film starts with him in awe at a presentation in a planetarium, and ends with images of celestial bodies in space which, in context, turn out to be quite hopeful. This is also a relief, as so much of this film is about how the British education was not just failing the children of West Indian immigrants in the eighties, but outright targeting them to be set up for failure.

Kingsley (a fantastic Kenyah Sandy) has trouble reading, his working class parents are too busy to notice, and his teachers at school berate him for it. Instead of getting him the individual attention he needs to thrive, they convince his mother (Sharlene Whyte) he should be transferred to a so-called “special school,” under wildly misleading pretenses. In the first half of Education, I feared that this would be a story of a bright young buy robbed of his future because his parents are too busy to advocate for him. In the beginning, his mother has no patience and actually believes the transfer was a good idea just because he no longer seems to be causing trouble.

Thankfully, McQueen (who co-wrote the script) doesn’t take the story in the expected direction, and things begin to turn around. It’s how that is done that makes this story compelling. Making maxium use of unusually little time, McQueen packs in a lot of information, especially about the racial biases of the British, who make wild assumptions about Black people’s, and especially West Indian people’s, intelligence. These are immigrants who had all the same kinds of careers and intellectual pursuits back home as the white people take for granted here. I suppose if Education were missing anything—and this would apply to all five films, actually—it would be what made life in the Caribbean so much worse that even this is the better option.

Perhaps that is beside the point, and simply not the story Steve McQueen is telling. Instead, we see a mother, and indeed an entire family (including a father and an academically advanced older sister), awaken to Kingsley’s challenges and then come to his aide. There are two scenes in which Kingsley breaks down crying, and McQueen lingers on him sobbing for an uncomfortable length of time. It’s heartbreaking, but at least the second time it’s accompanied by much-needed familial support. It’s the turning of a corner.

That might just be what “Small Axe” is, collectively, as well: the turning of a corner. Nothing like this has ever been done before, presented in this way before, and it is eminently satisfying. What these films represent, the untold stories of people outside the chaivinist confines of America, is something the world needs more of.

You’ll never be so pleased to get an Education. — You’ll never be so pleased to get an *Education*.

Overall: A-