THE STORY – Since the 1980s, the video shop has been a desperately necessary space for film culture. In “Videoheaven,” Alex Ross Perry tells the story of the neighborhood video shop to consider wider, changing social histories, using appropriated footage from the high and lowbrow.
THE CAST – Maya Hawke
THE TEAM – Alex Ross Perry (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 173 Minutes
Five blocks down from the Fifth Avenue intersection that boasts Rockefeller Center and St. Patrick’s Cathedral as abutting landmarks is BOOKOFF New York. It’s not the same location that birthed the now-chain’s slew of stores in 2000; that one was closer to Grand Central Station, a similarly bustling hub of tourists and jaywalkers alike. But it’s close enough. Midtown is Midtown. When you enter the store, you’re met by a swath of figurines from the Incredible Hulk to “Dragonball Z’s” Goku. The real attraction, however, sits in BOOKOFF’s basement – which remains anywhere from boiling to sweltering year-round – entirely separate from the shelves of books, video games, and Funko Pops. Filling up shelves of their own are Blu-Ray discs, DVDs, and boxsets of films and television shows, all of which have been meticulously categorized into groups ranging from “Horror” to “Superhero” and beyond. Boutique labels like Criterion, Kino Lorber, and Arrow Video all have their own sections; no matter the genre, each collection of films is alphabetized. The titles range in price from $3.99 to upwards of $75, depending on the disc’s rarity, condition, and more.
There are plenty of other places in New York where cinephiles can buy new and used physical copies of their favorite films, but few and far between actually maintain the authentic “video store” experience. Brooklyn’s Film Noir Cinema is practically the last rental-based store in New York and certainly, the only one to still employ a proper rental clerk (Will Malitek, who also owns and runs the shop as its sole employee). Night Owl Video, which opened in Williamsburg earlier this year, isn’t a hub for rentals. Still, it has the feel of the classic video store, from its purple and yellow color scheme to its “Death to Streamers! Physical Media Forever!” mission statement. The still-iconic Kim’s Video chain closed its final Manhattan location in 2014; the store’s physical media collection has since found a home on the bottom floor of Lower Manhattan’s Alamo Drafthouse – where it can still be rented, now for free – but it’s hardly what Kim’s used to be when it was housed on 1st Avenue.
In his second feature of 2025, former Kim’s employee turned indie filmmaker Alex Ross Perry offers a three-hour tour through the golden age of the video-rental store, facilities that fell by the wayside long ago and, despite an attempted revival in form like those aforementioned, remain a cultural curio for youthful minds in search of relics to gawk upon. An essay film as much as it is a documentary, “Videoheaven” takes a sweeping snapshot of the footprint-cum-chokehold video stores once had on the world’s most curious movie lovers while also dedicating a sizable amount of attention to the depiction of physical media houses in film and television themselves. A bear to behold but a thrill to digest, it’s as moving and fascinating a document that its subjects, plastic boxes containing polycarbonate discs, could ever dream of having (One imagines that Pavement, the subject of Perry’s first film of the year, “Pavements,” felt similarly).
If those rectangles containing smaller circles within don’t dream, Perry’s film suggests that the homes in which they sit waiting to be checked out for the next few days and those renting them certainly do have the capacity for fantasy and that the video rental experience was not inextricable from a reverie during its heyday. Narrated by Maya Hawke, “Videoheaven” is comprised of footage from movies, television, commercials, and a few workplace conduct videos. Hawke details the history of such cultural stomping grounds, a chapter in time that has all but concluded. “Every depiction of a video store [in film or television] is of or from the past,” Hawke notes. “Our only opportunity to visit one now is to see them on screen.”
And for the most part, our narrator is spot-on – she’s even worked in one of these on-screen recreations, Hawkins’ “Family Video“ from “Stranger Things,“ and clips of Hawke’s character Robin working with Joe Keery’s Steve recur throughout “Videoheaven.“ Ironic as it is to have the voice of “Inside Out 2’s” Anxiety soundtrack your film about the death of a cultural staple, it’s an inspired choice to have a youthful cinephile speak on our everchanging watch-at-home landscape. Just as striking is Perry’s commitment to attacking his thesis from all angles, therefore dedicating separate chapters to the many facets that made video stores such a widespread phenomenon.
Notable, too, is that his chosen concepts – the VCR boom, the jerky clerks at the counter, those hoping to hit on the friendlier cashiers, the middle-aged men who dared to sneak off to the porn section while their daughters perused the animated sector, etc. – are all specific to American consumers, as this is the country in which this societal microcosm flourished most prolifically. It’s no wonder that most of the DVD marketplace-set clips are represented not only in Hollywood productions like “The Last Action Hero,” “The Holiday,“ and “This Means War,“ but in a resplendent fashion that sees each venue positioning itself as though it’s the last stop on the bus for nine-to-fivers in search of their activity for the evening. No happy hour, no date night, but a movie on the couch that must be returned in three days, or your money not back.
Of course, “Videoheaven“ also features nods to shows like “Seinfeld“ and “Friends,“ both of which featured at least one scene taking place in a video store over their decade-long runs. The characters in those scenes were less likely to be seen actually talking about their selections as they were reconnecting over a happenstance run-in with an ex or, better yet, mocking a prospective customer’s hesitancy to commit to his interest in the curtain-guarded “Adult’s Only“ room (A very funny clip from a “Simpsons“ episode shows that same section at “Lackluster Video“ being dedicated to foreign art films, much to Bart’s dismay). Perry’s point has less to do with there being a mass depiction of these havens than there having been a depiction at all. These places used to mean and represent something, “Videoheaven“ argues, and now, if they exist in the public consciousness at all, they’re a distant memory, a “remember those?“ topic of conversation to be had while scouring a streamer. That experience is more universal than one’s passion for places like BOOKOFF, Night Owl, or Kim’s, but they had a specific brand of universality to them in their own rights. We should smile because that happened, but it’s okay to cry because it’s over, too.
