Kim's Video

2023

Documentary

7
Rotten Tomatoes Critics - Certified Fresh 71% · 63 reviews
Rotten Tomatoes Audience - Upright 75%
IMDb Rating 7.0/10 10 1101 1.1K

new york city video store manhattan, new york city vhs tapes

Director

David Redmon Photo
David Redmon

Top cast

Alex Ross Perry Photo
Alex Ross Perry as Self
Tim League Photo
Tim League as Self - Alamo Drafthouse
Joel Coen Photo
Joel Coen as Self - Filmmaker
Ethan Coen Photo
Ethan Coen as Self - Filmmaker
720p.WEB 1080p.WEB
810.61 MB
1280*720
English 2.0
NR
us  
23.976 fps
1 hr 28 min
Seeds 3
1.62 GB
1920*1080
English 5.1
NR
us  
23.976 fps
1 hr 28 min
Seeds 9

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by masonfisk 8 / 10

BE KIND, REWIND...?

A 2023 documentary about the famed video store which resided in Downtown Manhattan. Having never gone but a close friend would rent the occasional cinematic oddity (he once got me a copy of the workprint for John Woo's Hard Target) from there which due to the tenor of the times went the way of the dodo (like most other video stores) but what kept customers coming back again & again was the eclectic selection they provided but when time came for the business to shutter its doors & its acolytes were worried where the treasure trove of filmic ephemera would go, a surprising wrinkle to the story emerged, as evidenced by the filmmaker, David Redmon. Redmon learned the entire collection would be shipped off to a remote town in Italy under the agreement they would curate the films as an exhibition for travelers to see & even extend a courtesy to former customers who still wanted to rent the occasional vid to make a pilgramage for that purpose. To Redmon's horror when he did manage to find the facility which housed the tapes, water was leaking on some of them from the ceiling & no straight answer was given as to what was going on. What follows is a months long gambit for Redmon to track down 'the' Mr. Kim (who lived in New Jersey & was an aspiring filmmaker in his own right), the custodians of the collection & see if a new deal to bring the tapes back to America could be brokered. Starting off as a proper tribute to a by gone era soon morphs into the loopiest heist escapade any doc has ever seen w/the audience ringside to see the lunacy play itself out.
Reviewed by tobiwalker 10 / 10

Nostalgic pull at the heartstrings for those who remember...

I'm not from New York. Each city had one of these cult-service video stores. My city had Eddie Brandt's Saturday Matinee, which closed permanently during Covid with rumors that Quentin Tarantino actually bought out the archive, presumably to avoid what happened with Kim's. Before the internet these stores were essential for students of film and those in seek of entertainment outside the restrictive limits of Blockbuster. With fond memories of the days of video rentals, I got emotionally invested in the fate of Kim's videos and watched until the very end to see what happened to the artifacts so beloved by so many people. Folks too young to have known anything other than the endless resources of streaming and the internet might not understand...
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