Home Video (VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, 4k)

A man shuffles along a royal blue carpet and props himself up against a stacked shelf of videos. Reeling off a list of films, he is handed three store-branded DVD cases. In return? A crisp fiver – plus his thoughts on South Korean horror flicks without any dialogue. This isn’t a sepia-tinged flashback from the past. Nor is it all just a dream. It is 2024 and the transaction is taking place at Snips Movies, one of the UK’s last video rental stores, tucked away in a town in Wirral since 1995. The odd passerby does a double take, staring back at the shop’s welly-green facade to confirm its reality.

Snips’ owner, Dave Wain, is part of a small cast of movie mavericks refusing to let video rental fade to black. Alongside Snips, just two other original video rental stores still stand. There’s TVL Allstar Video in Haverhill, opened in 1984, a detached brick video and print shop that’s barely changed in the last 40 years. Then there’s 20th Century Flicks in Bristol, which manager Dave Taylor says began as a “slightly piratical enterprise knocking out dubious copies of ET”, and has a focus on queer and arthouse cinema. Another, For Your Eyes Only in Forest Hill, south London, survived until November last year. A few months earlier, a parked car rolled down a hill and smashed through the shop window. Stranger Still, this literal block-buster was also a sequel – the exact same thing had happened before. A local fundraiser tried to save the business, but the damage had been done and owner Gulam Charania was forced to close after 25 years.

For the next generation, there’s VideOdyssey, which was opened by journalist and Tarantino enthusiast Andy Johnson in Liverpool in 2018, offering an immersive movie experience, VCR hire and an arcade. While the original rental crew may be sceptical of a non-original shop trying to tap into a video revival, it proves that there’s an audience for new stores. Hackney’s film emporium Ümit & Son, too, deserves a special mention. While not really dealing in video rental any more, it does rent out its micro-cinema. Owner Ümit Mesut and film-maker Liam Saint-Pierre run a cult film club, Ciné Real, screening films with a 16mm projector in its red-curtained back room to cool young things who believe film-on-film is anything but hackneyed. Then, there’s Close-Up, a film centre and cafe in Shoreditch, which hosts arthouse events and lets members borrow films and books from its 25,000-strong library of movies and related cinema paraphernalia.