In a world of viral sensations and disposable culture, our team picks the physical media objects that deserve to find a permanent place in your home. This month, you might even consider buying these as a gift for someone special in your life.
Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (Criterion Collection)
Some childhood films stay frozen in nostalgia, but Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure never felt like that. Despite springing from a children’s TV character, Tim Burton’s debut always played out like a strangely grown-up experience. Returning to it now, you feel its evolution – the way it grows with you, revealing new layers each time. It’s funny, thrilling, occasionally frightening and unexpectedly beautiful.
Criterion’s new 4K Blu-ray captures that spirit perfectly, arriving in packaging as considered as the film itself.
Faisal Al Zaabi, gaming journalist
Wish You Were Here 50th-anniversary reissue by Pink Floyd (Sony Records)
Go ahead and buy that record player you’ve been eyeing for years – you now have the perfect excuse. On December 12, Pink Floyd and Sony Records will mark the 50th anniversary of Wish You Were Here with a deluxe re-release spanning box set, CD, digital formats and vinyl, complete with previously unreleased alternates and demos. At a lean 44 minutes, the album still punches well above its weight, capturing the melancholy and disillusion of the modern world, the ache of loss and all the truisms that haven’t softened since 1975. The 13-minute opener, Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Pts. 1-5), begins with a drone that nods to Eastern traditions, while pushing firmly into the future with synths and heavy-reverb guitar. And the title track – the album’s most famous – still takes you back to a simpler time, letting nostalgia steer: “We’re just two lost souls, swimming in a fish bowl, year after year.”
Aspiring guitarists, take note: you can learn that intro riff the same night you bring this home and let the vinyl carry you back through the decades.
Kat Balleh, social media editor
Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting by Sarah Howgate (National Portrait Gallery Publications)
It’s been a while since I picked up a paintbrush, but in my more artistic days Jenny Saville loomed large – as she did for almost anyone practising portraiture in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, or any art historian looking at the visual world through a feminist lens. Rising to prominence in the early 1990s, her work became recognisable for its bold depictions of the female form – not photogenic flattery, but unapologetic flesh in all its variations. Her work was a direct challenge to the objectified gaze of the “lad mag” culture of the era.
Earlier this year, the National Portrait Gallery in London hosted a show titled Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting. I may have missed the exhibition, but I’m not missing the book. The accompanying volume features all 60 works, along with detailed close-ups and studio photography.
Hayley Kadrou, deputy features editor
Truly by Lionel Richie (HarperCollins)
Lionel Richie’s memoir reads a lot like one of his concerts: fun, colourful and packed with the kinds of anecdotes only someone with a five-decade career can tell. It almost comes as a surprise that it took him this long to release Truly. The book moves from his childhood in Tuskegee in the American South to the long nights gigging with the Commodores, and into the 1980s stretch, when he became one of the decade’s defining voices.
What gives the memoir its pull is Richie’s admission that even at the height of his fame, he was still dealing with stage fright, doubt and the uneasy edges of being a celebrity. He writes about the break-up of the Commodores, the burnout that followed and the long road back – all with the dry Southern humour that fans will recognise from his shows. For a figure whose songs have soundtracked so much of modern pop, this memoir is entertaining, candid and ultimately hopeful.
Saeed Saeed, arts & culture writer
Who is the Sky? by David Byrne (Matador Records)
David Byrne returns with Who Is the Sky?, his first album since 2018’s American Utopia. The album came out in September, but it belongs in this physical media round-up because it’s exactly why vinyl still exists. Produced by Grammy-winner Kid Harpoon and arranged by New York’s Ghost Train Orchestra, it pairs Byrne’s anthropological lyricism with a 15-piece chamber ensemble that gives the songs a vivid, eccentric pulse. Guests include St Vincent, Paramore’s Hayley Williams, The Smile’s Tom Skinner and percussionist Mauro Refosco. They drift through the record, especially on the buoyant single Everybody Laughs.
Inspired by Ghost Train Orchestra’s 2023 Moondog tribute, Byrne embraced their offbeat instrumentation as a late-career push into the unexpected. With psychedelic packaging by Shira Inbar and styling by Belgian artist Tom Van der Borght, it’s a release designed to be experienced – and collected – on vinyl.
Nasri Atallah, TN Magazine editor
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