Oak Cliff Review: “Videoheaven”

[New Film Festival Today writer Billy Ray Brewton continues his coverage of the 2025 Oak Cliff Festival.]

Videoheaven (Alex Ross Perry, 2025) 2 out of 5 stars

I am nostalgia in human form. It’s basically my entire brand. If you are pop culture from the 1980s or ‘90s, the likelihood is high that I have consumed you, and consumed you often. I gobble up ephemera like cannibals gobble up Donners. So, with that in mind, something like Videoheaven exists as a chamber of my heart.

For starters, it’s a documentary. Add to that, it’s a sort of experimental documentary. Even more, it’s directed by the great Alex Ross Perry, whose most recent masterpiece, Pavements, is still playing in theaters, and whose previous films—Listen Up Philip, That Smell, Queen of Earth—are cinephile-favored treats. Oh, and did I mention the entire thing is about the history and legacy of the video store? And that it’s narrated by Maya Hawke? And that it’s made up, almost entirely, of scenes from films set in video stores? While you absorb all of that, let me tell you what I thought about all three hours of it. 

Videoheaven feels like a lot of different things. It is of the same ilk as Thom Andersen’s 2003 Los Angeles Plays Itself, though a touch more mainstream in its leanings. Not everyone cares about Los Angeles, but most everyone of a certain age remembers video stores. It also has the tone of a Rodney Ascher picture quite abundantly, maybe not as stylized as The Nightmare, but definitely in line with Room 237 and A Glitch in the Matrix. And then, there’s the breadth of the damned thing. It’s not quite as long as Kier-La Janisse’ 2021 Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror, but it comes very, very close and it has that quality and ability to amble through topics in an almost dreamlike way, unlike another, “lesser than” comparison, David A. Weiner’s In Search of Darkness films. So, yeah, it’s a lot of different things being used to tell a fairly simple story.

Growing up in the 1980s and ‘90s, video stores were ubiquitous and we all have our stories, from the local mom-and-pop shop to whichever of the three big-box stores was in your neighborhood. A lot of us worked at a video store, and it was likely your first real job. It was as instrumental a part of everyday life, for a time, as the post office or the dry cleaners. Those of us of that generation can basically track the entire lifespan of the video store. I still remember when the last Blockbuster closed down in my county … then my state … then my region. Because of how seminal video stores were to so many of us, that might explain Perry’s thought process behind taking what should have been the subject of a polished 90-minute documentary and turning it into a meandering, gluttonous, repetitive slog through recent history. And it’s not even that I’m mad at the thing; I’m just disappointed.

Many of the issues with Videoheaven stem from the script itself. Maya Hawke narrates the entirety of the film, and the voiceover, as written, requires her to repeat herself over and over again, making the same points, however valid, until we’ve damned near been beaten to death with them. There was one five-minute section towards the beginning where she said the exact same thing three times, with maybe a word or two different. At first, I thought it was an issue with the film and maybe I was watching an older cut. That was not the case. The narration is far too serious and far too professorial for a film about something so fun and adventurous. The narration just doesn’t work with the subject, and Perry’s relentless attempts to make video stores more important than they were become tiresome very quickly. Unlike Pavements, his brilliant, meta, unique 2024 documentary about the band Pavement, Videoheaven lacks the same confidence and feels like it was a pet project that some of his friends admired, encouraging him to do something with it. With friends like those, who needs guardrails?

I know some of you will be like, “But video stores were important!” Well, sure they were. They changed the Hollywood distribution system forever. They gave rise to different forms of physical media, and paved the way for a company like Netflix. And they were foundational to the childhoods of just about everyone who had access to one. But that’s it. Outside of its niche, video stores were just a passing fad in the never-ending cycle of capitalism. And for as much nostalgia as I and others have for them, trying to make the video store seem as important as the Civil War or Civil Rights feels a bit disjointed and privileged.

When Errol Morris makes a film like his 1978 Gates of Heaven, he’s not trying to proclaim that the loss of a pet is greater or less than anything else. He presents the images and lets them speak for themselves. When you add such verbose narration, and have Maya Hawke deliver it with such seriousness, you’re making one hell of a statement. And you might think comparing Videoheaven to Gates of Heaven is unfair, but pets and video stores are both things I remember as they were born … and as they passed.

Begrudging a filmmaker like Perry for taking a fun detour isn’t really something I want to do, but I had high hopes for this film, and had hoped it would be more subversive and unique, similar to its subject, rather than just an information dump. But we have what we have. I am sure there is an entire group of cinephiles out there who will go gaga for this film, and I have zero doubts it will become a cult classic, screening at odd times in arthouse theatres for years to come. Los Angeles Plays Itself shares a similar fate, and that’s all well and good. Still, when I sit down to watch a documentary, I’m not just looking to learn something, but to experience a filmmaker’s vision and the totality and spirit of the subject being investigated. Any idiot can go online and find a recipe for something and then duplicate it exactly. What separates a chef from a cook is the ability to take a recipe and bend it to your tastes and talents. As a grand consumer of all things nostalgia, I have to send Videoheaven back to the kitchen because it is definitely underbaked and overstuffed. Sometimes our pet projects belong in Gates of Heaven.

Billy Ray Brewton

Billy Ray Brewton is the producer and founder of Make Believe Theatricals, which specializes in promoting unique creative voices that exist outside the mainstream. Billy Ray was the subject of the award-winning documentary, Skanks (Slamdance 2014); wrote and directed the award-winning dramatic horror film Show Yourself (Bruce Campbell’s Horror Film Fest 2017); produced the award-winning documentary Socks on Fire (Tribeca 2020, “Best Documentary Feature”); and served as associate producer on the horror anthology, The Mortuary Collection (Fantastic Fest 2019, “Audience Choice Best Feature”). The short film he produced in 2016, Pool Shark, currently has over 100 million views on YouTube. His next project as a producer, Mental Health and Horror, is scheduled for release in 2025. He is a member of the Dramatists Guild, IDA, and Documentary Producers Alliance; is the ultimate heel on the Screen Drafts podcast; and writes about film for Cinepunx.