Videoheaven Is a Nostalgic, Bloated Tribute to Video Store Culture

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The experience of visiting the neighborhood video store, engaging in a social custom in the course of browsing the aisles to select a film to bring home to watch, tends to be a memory held with a certain nostalgic reverence by any film lover over a certain age. If you were a child or teenager in the 1980s or 1990s, then the idea of the video store is likely a formative one: The first place where you encountered frightening or gory VHS or DVD covers (my mind immediately goes to Hellraiser and Pinhead), or dalliances into the forbidden room behind the beaded curtain, which housed the hushed “adult section.” Filmmaker Alex Ross Perry’s new documentary Videoheaven would seem to be a loving tribute to this era in general, to the shared communal experience that is all but forgotten at this point by anyone under the age of 20, but in truth the sprawling assembly of footage–because it does feel considerably more like a YouTube video essay than a genuine feature documentary–is instead an obsessive, often pedantically detailed examination of how the video store has been portrayed in entertainment and news media through both its life and afterlife. With an incredibly deep and frankly excessive wealth of archival footage at its disposal, Perry examines filmic versions of the video store experience, drawing conclusions about what they meant to us, how filmmakers used them, and how we processed the end of the video store era.

One will be very unsurprised to find that Perry (who also directed this year’s well-received Pavements) was of course a former video clerk himself, as only someone who had worked in that role would have ever made this film, or thought to focus in such length–at times interminable–on the depiction of tropes such as cinematic depictions of the video store clerk. The film likewise examines other tropes at length, from the video store as an illicit gateway to the world of sex and violence, to its evolution into a bastion of family friendly entertainment, to its role as a breeding ground for awkward social and romantic interaction. This might sound like an academic survey of a particular niche within media, but Perry does not spare his own opinion, which can frequently make Videoheaven take on an air of bitterness; an old video clerk’s long-delayed airing of grievances against the character archetype he had been lumped into by the very films he so loves.

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Perry’s film attempts to distance himself from what could feel like a screed, however, by instead centering the voice of actress Maya Hawke as the narrator–the only voice we ever hear in Videoheaven, which does not feature any talking head-type interviewing, another aspect that makes it something other than traditional documentary. This is an interesting choice, as Hawke’s dulcet tones and entertaining delivery do function to soften what would otherwise more obviously come off with an air of bitterness. But it’s also an odd one, as the film never really acknowledges the identity of its narrator outside of the credits: Not even when it’s opening with her describing a scene from 2000’s Hamlet, which stars her own father Ethan Hawke wandering a video store aisles as he delivers the “to be, or not to be,” soliloquy. What does Hawke feel, seeing her dad in his prime, in a setting she’s almost too young to have fully experienced, but that is deeply connected to the history of her chosen career? What does she think about having likewise played a 1980s video clerk herself as a character on Netflix’s Stranger Things? We see that footage as well, without Hawke being free to acknowledge that footage of herself is currently unspooling on screen. On one hand, it’s a cinematic in-joke for the audience of Videoheaven, who will almost certainly be aware of Hawke’s connection to both Stranger Things and Hamlet. But simultaneously, it’s also a missed opportunity to include the perspective of a second viewpoint, someone who grew up in the dying days of the video store. Instead, the actress/singer (Perry directed several of her music videos) is just used as a mouthpiece for the director’s opinions, giving them a more mellifluous air.

There’s also no getting around the fact that Videoheaven is both gratuitously overstuffed at nearly three hours in length, and occasionally quite sloppy. This is highlighted in the most surreal of fashions only 10 minutes into the film, when Hawke’s narrator reads the following line, part of Videoheaven’s overall thesis: “The video store went from being mysterious and dangerous to representing a broad, unremarkable part of daily life.” Would you believe that the very next words from Hawke, some 20 or 30 seconds later, is another take of the exact same line, repeated verbatim? It’s such a basic flub that I immediately had to rewind to be certain that I hadn’t somehow imagined it. For a film that was reportedly “10 years in the making” and premiered at Tribeca, did no one actually watch the first 10 minutes of it before signing off on the final assembly? How does such an embarrassing error see the light of day? It’s genuinely perplexing.

At its best, however, Videoheaven does possess a certain aura of enchantment that submerges the viewer totally within a lost world that now only exists within projected images. This mostly comes down to the extremely impressive depth of archival footage that Perry has assembled, an absolutely encyclopedic collection of video store depictions from the 1980s through 2010s, many of which can’t help but make you daydream about stepping through screen to experience these places at different points in our recent history. To see an independent video store in say, the heyday of the ‘80s slasher boom, or the emerging corporate juggernaut of Blockbuster during the ‘90s Disney renaissance, conjures a wistfulness for a more tactile experience of watching movies: Agonizing in the aisles over what to select, what to spend your hard-won coin to view, rather than just starting a stream, knowing that you can walk away at any time. But these impressions come to the viewer during Videoheaven mostly as a result of just allowing the archival footage–the distilled history it represents–to wash over you, and it can sometimes feel like Perry’s script is almost intrusive, trying to pull the viewer away from the reverie of seeing these vanished places, as it focuses in on reiterating waves of minutia.

The experience of Videoheaven, is, in a way, summed up by its first 13 minutes, which actually gives a fairly succinct overview of the entire rise and fall of the video store, feeling for all intents and purposes almost like a conventional video essay that has been re-used as an overture. For many viewers, these 13 minutes would frankly get most of the film’s points across in rather expeditious fashion, but once that extended intro is done, Perry then rewinds back to the beginning of the 1980s to begin his far more detailed and bloated critique, immediately giving the viewer a sense of deja vu–“here’s the same story, except much, much slower.”

One might think that Videoheaven would close by celebrating those independent video stores that do still survive in lucky places with a committed, supportive niche customer base–such businesses are obviously rare, but they do still exist. Both of the cities in which I’ve lived while working for Paste (Atlanta and Richmond) in fact do have operational video rental stores in 2025. Perry, however, is not really interested in the video store in whatever limited capacity in which it currently exists; he instead primarily wants to relitigate how video stores have been portrayed, ultimately quibbling over representation of elements such as arrogant, unhelpful clerks or frustrating, embarrassing user experiences. He even gets around to eventually floating the idea that it was in fact Hollywood depictions of negative video store experiences that contributed to the general public’s eventual distaste for the video store experience: The movies and TV productions playing a role in turning customers against the very altars that sustained them for several decades. This feels like a myopic view, to say the least.

As an extremely extended assembly of nostalgic montage fodder, Videoheaven works, transporting us through time and space to places where it felt like the next great movie discovery was always just around the corner; a mystique that a streaming service menu can really never replicate. But as a documentary, it can’t really overcome its sheer indulgence, lack of timely edits, sloppy mistakes and oddly personal seeming grievances. In the end, Perry’s perspective, even when carried by Hawke’s soothing voice, can’t escape sounding uncomfortably like the same insufferably anal video clerk portrayals he’s frequently deriding. Perhaps you can take the clerk out of the store, but you can’t take the store out of the clerk.

Director: Alex Ross Perry
Release date: July-August 2025 (Limited theatrical engagements)

Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter or on Bluesky for more film writing.