physical media picks to watch in 2026 for vinyl and DVD lovers

High Fidelity is the obvious first pick. The 2000 film, directed by Stephen Frears and adapted from Nick Hornby’s 1995 novel, stars John Cusack as Rob Gordon, who runs a Chicago shop called Championship Vinyl. The book was set in London; the film moved it to the Wicker Park neighborhood without losing its spirit. Hornby himself was surprised at how closely it followed his story.

Rob and his two staffers, played by Jack Black and Todd Louiso, spend more time ranking albums than selling them. They can be snobs. They mock what customers buy. That’s the charm: the film knows these men care about music more than most people care about anything, and spending a couple of hours in their store feels like getting a recommendation from a human instead of an algorithm.

It found an audience too, taking $47.1 million worldwide, and Cusack earned a Golden Globe nomination. A Hulu series based on the same story, starring Zoë Kravitz, arrived on February 14, 2020.

If High Fidelity is the romantic comedy version of record shopping, All Things Must Pass is the true story. Colin Hanks directed this documentary about Tower Records, the American chain that grew huge yet often felt like an independent shop, with deep stock of rare releases and staff who looked like they had walked out of Championship Vinyl.

Making it took Hanks about seven years, and he finished in 2015 with the help of a $92,000 Kickstarter round. The film premiered at SXSW. Its title came from a sign a former employee put up at an old Sacramento store, which reminded Hanks of George Harrison’s 1970 triple album of the same name. Harrison’s widow, Olivia, let him use the title and the song.

The story has a sad ending that collectors know well. Tower closed in the US before the vinyl revival took off, and it’s hard to picture a big chain of record stores making it in the Spotify era. Some critics pointed out that the film skips the complaint that big chains like Tower pushed small independent shops out of business. Watch it as a love letter, not a business history.

Physical media isn’t only vinyl. Printed books are the oldest format of all, and You’ve Got Mail, the Nora Ephron romantic comedy with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, is built around a fight between a small children’s bookshop and a huge chain store on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Neither side in the film realizes the real threat to both is about to arrive online, which makes it bittersweet to rewatch.

Clerks, Kevin Smith’s 1994 black-and-white debut, looks like a convenience store comedy. But Dante’s best friend Randal works at the video rental shop next door, and the two spend the day arguing about movies. Smith shot it for $27,575 in stores where he really worked. It premiered at Sundance on January 22, 1994, went on to gross $4.4 million, and was added to the US National Film Registry in 2019.

The rental counter in Clerks dates the film more than anything else in it. Independent video stores are mostly gone, and so is Blockbuster, but the film captures what Friday nights used to feel like: picking a movie in a room full of people who wanted to talk about it.

Owning a physical copy means you decide when a show or album disappears, not a streaming company. When a series is removed from a service, people with the box set can keep watching while everyone else waits for it to turn up elsewhere. That happened with HBO’s Westworld, which was pulled from streaming.

There’s a privacy angle as well. Streaming apps record what you watch and use it to build a profile for ads. A cassette or a Blu-ray player has no idea what you like and tells no one. Younger buyers in particular say the constant tracking and the stack of monthly subscriptions are part of why they’re buying discs, CDs and even VHS tapes.

Shop owners see it on the counter. Tom Anderton, who runs Tom’s Music Trade in Red Lion, says CDs have made a clear comeback over the past year and cassettes are selling like crazy. For him the draw is “the whole package”: the sleeve, the poster, the notes you read as a kid. Nobody claims this threatens Netflix, but it’s a real habit, not just a TikTok trend.

Four films can’t cover everything. If you finish these and want more, three other titles fit the same mood:

• Empire Records, another record store favorite.
• Vinyl, a natural pick for record collectors.
• The Last Blockbuster, a 2020 documentary about the one remaining Blockbuster store in Bend, Oregon, and its general manager, Sandi Harding. Kevin Smith appears to talk about the small rental shops Blockbuster pushed aside and how they shaped Clerks.

The Last Blockbuster also explains how the chain fell, through poor management and the 2008 financial crisis, while its last store kept going. Critics called it slight but fun, and it holds a 71% score on Rotten Tomatoes from 28 reviews. Pair it with All Things Must Pass for a double bill about two chains that defined how a generation shopped for entertainment.