Best Video Store

It's a tossup between the Beach's New Concept Video and Lion when it comes to selection: Both stand as cinematic oases in a desert of unadventurous Blockbusters. Browse the aisles of either store and you'll find a solid array of new and classic independent pictures, oodles of gay and lesbian titles, a host of wonderfully oddball documentaries, and plenty of mainstream faves (should you discover your date has yet to experience the sublime joys of The Bad News Bears). Still the nod has to go to Lion, which imports videos from Europe for foreign-film-starved Miami audiences. Thus while you will find the heavyweight directorial champs of yesteryear, such as Jean-Luc Godard and Eric Rohmer, you'll also be able to snag offerings from the current stars of international cinema, including hard-to-find works from Iran's Abbas Kiarostami or France's Leos Carax, whose head-spinning The Lovers on the Bridge languished overseas without an American distributor for nine years; for a good chunk of that time, the video at least was reassuringly nestled inside Lion.