Perhaps no line of dialogue better encapsulates lived experience than this bon mot offered by John Huston’s Noah Cross: “Of course I'm respectable. I'm old! Politicians, ugly buildings and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.”

I thought about this line––granted, a line I think about at least once a week––while watching Alex Ross Perry’s Videoheaven, which is perhaps the closet a movie can come to putting us back in the four walls of a video store, a concept so old that some people reading this will have never directly experienced that once-commonplace, even disreputable home of cinephilia. Building off Daniel Herbert's book Videoland: Movie Culture at the American Video Store, Perry spins a history through film, television, and documentary clips overlaid with a soothing narration from Maya Hawke, who happens to play a video store clerk on Stranger Things and whose father is featured in Videoheaven's very first sequence. This is a movie of both choice and coincidence, assembled carefully but perhaps with a certain kind of kismet tying it all together.

With Videoheaven beginning a limited run––you’ll hear more about its exact New York venue herein––I spoke to Perry and Clyde Folley, his editor on the film and an editorial voice at Criterion.