Next Week in Virtual Tickets: Films sort of playing Boston 14 August 2020 - 21 August 2020

Keep writing to Save Your Cinema, and maybe check out Nightstream, the virtual festival that will be subbing for BUFF (and four others around the country) this year. In the meantime...

• The Brattle Theatre opens a pair of documentaries: Represent follows three women vying for public office in the midwest, and features a pre-recorded Q&A with director Hilary Bachelder. That one is new; Jazz on a Summer's Day has been showing up at the Brattle since 1959 and its latest iteration features a spiffy new restoration. They also continue Creem: America's Only Rock 'n' Roll Magazine, You Never Had It - An Evening with Bukowski, Beats, and Shanghai Triad, the latter two marked as being in their final week.
• The Coolidge Corner Theatre also adds Jazz on a Summer's Day to their selections, and if you want more music, there's River City Drumbeat, a documentary following people from three generations involved in a Louisville, KY school's drum corps. They also get I Used to Go Here, starring Gillian Jacobs as an author who makes a return trip to her college to deliver a lecture at the behest of the professor she had a crush on 15 years earlier (Jermaine Clement). Those play in addition to A Thousand Cuts, Creem, The Fight, and John Lewis: Good Trouble.
  
  On top of those, there's the weekly Coolidge Education seminar on Thursday, with NYU professor Dr. Sujay Pandit examining Spike Jonze's Her; sign up, watch the introduction, find the movie on whatever services you favor (or pull a disc off the shelf), and then return for the Q&A.
• The West Newton Cinema continues to play The Burnt Orange Heresy, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Casablanca,Motherless Brooklyn, The Goonies, The Wizard of Oz, and Happy Feet through at least the weekend. Starting on Wednesday, they also have a four-day run of Christmas on Ice, a Lifetime-looking holiday romance made by local filmmakers.
  
  The Lexington Venue is also open at least through Sunday, featuring Made in Italy, which stars Liam Neeson and son Micahel Richardson as an estranged family traveling from London to sell the house that the father inherited from his wife. They also have The Burnt Orange Heresy and Summerland.
• The Somerville Theatre holds steady with The Fight, Amulet, John Lewis: Good Trouble, the Quarantine Cat Film Fest, Pahokee, and Alice in their virtual screening room; same with The Capitol who have the "One Small Step" shorts, the Cat Film Fest, The Surrogate, and Heimat Is a Space in Time in their own virtual theater but is open to serve ice cream and snacks.
• The Regent Theatre shows Creem, What Doesn't Kill Us, Reggae Boyz (marked with "last chance"), and WBCN and the American Revolution on their site, although you may have to .
• The Brattle, the Coolidge, and West Newton have all been offering relatively reasonable rentals for up to 20-ish people; you may have to dig through their websites or call them directly get quotes on rates, available slots, and what the rules on concessions and masking are.
• Many of the multiplexes are targeting next weekend for re-opening, with AMC announcing 15-cent movies for Thursday the 20th at their re-opening theaters, though showtimes and seating will be limited and staggered to allow for extra cleaning. Boston Common will have Bloodshot (including Imax), Black Panther, the live-action Beauty and the Beast, the classic Ghostbusters, The Empire Strikes Back, Grease, Back to the Future, and The Goonies; South Bay currently lists multiple screens for Bloodshot (including Imax), Black Panther, and Back to the Future. Further afield, Burlington has Beauty and the Beast and The Goonies; Braintree has Jumanji: The Next Level, Black Panther, and Back to the Future; and the Liberty Tree Mall has Bloodshot (including Imax), I Still Believe, Jumanji: The Next Level, Sonic the Hedgehog, Beauty and the Beast, Ghostbusters, The Empire Strikes Back, Grease, Back to the Future, and The Goonies. The location at Assembly Square in Somerville does NOT appear to be opening yet, and a quick dig through the Stubs app makes it appear that the Massachusetts locations are not offering pick-up for snacks yet. You might also find your Stubs account "paused", as I have, which shouldn't be a big deal for those 15-cent shows, but Friday may be a different story.

Again, tempted to go to Lexington, but between Lollapuzzoola and this huge virtual pile of screeners for Fantasia, I will probably stay safely in my living room.