Small Axe Criterion

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, film critics, international festivalgoers, and other studious viewers were swept up by the tide of Italian neorealism. Meanwhile, mainstream Italian audiences were indulging in a different kind of cinema experience: the sensational, extravagant melodramas of director Raffaello Matarazzo. Though turning to neorealism for character types and settings, these haywire hits about splintered love affairs and broken homes, all starring mustachioed matinee idol Amedeo Nazzari and icon of feminine purity Yvonne Sanson, luxuriate in delirious plot twists and overheated religious symbolism. Four of them are collected here, chronicles of men and women on long and serpentine roads to redemption, each less restrained and more wildly fun than the last.

Giving voice to the anguish of a nation fighting for its soul, Usmar Ismail’s After the Curfew follows the descent into disillusionment of a former freedom fighter who is unable to readjust to civilian life following the revolution that gave Indonesia its independence from the Netherlands. Steeped in moody atmospherics and psychological tension, the film struck its national cinema like a bolt of lightning, illuminating on-screen, for the first time and with unflinching realism, the emotional toll of Indonesian society’s postcolonial struggles.

Two old pals reunite for a camping trip in Oregon's Cascade Mountains.

A wealthy but neurotic Southern belle finds herself trapped in the hideout of a gang of vicious bootleggers. The gang's leader lusts after her, and is determined not to let anything stand in the way of his having her.

A series of disjointed mythical tales set in first century Rome.

Federico Fellini’s career achieved new levels of eccentricity and brilliance with this remarkable, controversial, extremely loose adaptation of Petronius’s classical Roman satire, written during the reign of Nero. An episodic barrage of sexual licentiousness, godless violence, and eye-catching grotesquerie, Fellini Satyricon follows the exploits of two pansexual young men—the handsome scholar Encolpius and his vulgar, insatiably lusty friend Ascyltus—as they move through a landscape of free-form pagan excess. Creating apparent chaos with exquisite control, Fellini constructs a weird old world that feels like science fiction.

A monumental reimagining of American history, Barry Jenkins’s adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 2016 novel is a harrowing and rhapsodic journey through a still-echoing past. Weaving together historical fiction with moments of magical realism, The Underground Railroad is a full sensory immersion into the world of Cora (Thuso Mbedu), who, fleeing slavery, embarks on a treacherous quest for freedom—and is menaced by violence, supported by a clandestine community fighting for liberation, and haunted by the people she loses along the way. With images of searing power and stirring poetry, Jenkins delivers an epic saga of survival and resilience that pushes the limited-series format to new heights of cinematic transcendence.

A monumental reimagining of American history, Barry Jenkins’s adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 2016 novel is a harrowing and rhapsodic journey through a still-echoing past. Weaving together historical fiction with moments of magical realism, The Underground Railroad is a full sensory immersion into the world of Cora (Thuso Mbedu), who, fleeing slavery, embarks on a treacherous quest for freedom—and is menaced by violence, supported by a clandestine community fighting for liberation, and haunted by the people she loses along the way. With images of searing power and stirring poetry, Jenkins delivers an epic saga of survival and resilience that pushes the limited-series format to new heights of cinematic transcendence.

A monumental reimagining of American history, Barry Jenkins’s adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 2016 novel is a harrowing and rhapsodic journey through a still-echoing past. Weaving together historical fiction with moments of magical realism, The Underground Railroad is a full sensory immersion into the world of Cora (Thuso Mbedu), who, fleeing slavery, embarks on a treacherous quest for freedom—and is menaced by violence, supported by a clandestine community fighting for liberation, and haunted by the people she loses along the way. With images of searing power and stirring poetry, Jenkins delivers an epic saga of survival and resilience that pushes the limited-series format to new heights of cinematic transcendence.

A monumental reimagining of American history, Barry Jenkins’s adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 2016 novel is a harrowing and rhapsodic journey through a still-echoing past. Weaving together historical fiction with moments of magical realism, The Underground Railroad is a full sensory immersion into the world of Cora (Thuso Mbedu), who, fleeing slavery, embarks on a treacherous quest for freedom—and is menaced by violence, supported by a clandestine community fighting for liberation, and haunted by the people she loses along the way. With images of searing power and stirring poetry, Jenkins delivers an epic saga of survival and resilience that pushes the limited-series format to new heights of cinematic transcendence.