Much has been written about the value of the traditional filmgoing experience. Especially in this modern age, when a healthy percentage of the population carries a de facto movie screen in their pocket, it’s important to remember those intangible effects brought about by a large, dark, room and the company of strangers. It’s a mysterious thing, and an experience that I’ve always assumed is deeply rooted in some old animal ways of ours from when we sat around a fire and watched shadows at play on the walls.

But for all the value of tradition (and all the hand-wringing over our more space-age ways), one of my favorite ways to see film is in unfamiliar surroundings. Longtime Easthampton residents might recall the joy of Jack “The Barber” Franzek’s “Little Outdoor Theatre,” a completely homemade theater that Franzek operated in his backyard, where for decades he screened films for the neighborhood free of charge (he financed the rentals with tips from his barbershop customers). Franzek passed away this summer, but others carry on in their own way, setting up projectors in bookstores, community rooms, or anywhere else with a blank wall or room to hang a sheet. Look around for these unlikely theaters, and you’re sure to find something special.

So it is this week with the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, which is hosting a screening this Sunday of The Sturgeon Queens, director Julie Cohen’s new documentary about Russ and Daughters, a Lower East Side lox and herring shop that is ringing in its centennial this year. A piece of old New York that has become an unlikely but welcome survivor, the emporium’s history is narrated by a clutch of long-time customers, who sit around a table with copies of the script and kibbitz their way through the story. Also featured are two of the daughters for whom the store was named (the elder sister is now 100) and interviews with some of the shop’s more prominent customers, including Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (who took an early lesson in feminism from the inclusion of “and Daughters” in the shop’s name) and 60 Minutes correspondent Morley Safer.

Russ and Daughters, of course, is more than a place to buy fish. It’s living history, filled with the sorts of stories and experiences that all too often aren’t recorded before it’s too late. Here, that story spans European and American Jewish history, the rise of a metropolis, and much more—what a treat that Cohen has preserved it, that it might last for the next 100 years. It might not be a story for the multiplex, but it’s sure one worth hearing.

Also this week: A trio of special shows are screening at traditional theaters this week, beginning with a Thursday night show of Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead 2 at Cinemark Theaters. A follow up to the 2010 film of the same name (in which Joe Cross chronicled a sick-to-fit journey via juice fast), it finds Cross examining our American health habits and plotting a long-term solution to the nation’s obesity crisis. (You might want to skip the large popcorn this time.)

Also at Cinemark this week is the 1964 Stanley Kubrick classic Dr. Strangelove, a black comedy about the nuclear agenda in which Peter Sellers gets to play all the best parts and Slim Pickens gets to ride a nuclear bomb on its way down to earth.

Back in Amherst, the Amherst Cinema will be showing My Man Godfrey, a benchmark screwball comedy that pairs William Powell and Carole Lombard as the tramp and the lady: he’s a bum she picks up on a high-society scavenger hunt that calls for a “forgotten man.” After he takes a job as the family butler, it’s revealed that Godfrey might not be quite as indigent as his circumstances imply. Unlike so many watered-down “message” comedies of today, My Man Godfrey has never lost its cutting edge.•

Jack Brown can be reached at cinemadope@gmail.com.