HOW-TO DEPT.NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH

John Wilson, the thirty-eight-year-old filmmaker, was drinking iced coffee on his home turf of Ridgewood, Queens, one recent morning. He was in Rudy’s Bakery and Cafe, a venerable neighborhood joint, feeling on edge.

- —Madeleine Wulfahrt

He and his friend Cosmo Bjorkenheim, a film critic, were about to head over to Low Cinema, a tiny storefront movie theatre (forty-plus seats) that they, with another friend, had quietly opened nearby in May. “We have one employee,” Wilson said. “And she’s never, like, fully opened the theatre before.”

Their début bill had been a double feature of the 2002 rom-com “Two Weeks Notice,” starring Hugh Grant and Sandra Bullock, and a short from 1903 called “Rube and Mandy at Coney Island.” Bjorkenheim, who has a wisp of a mustache, said, “Our first full run was a director's cut of 'Dirty Work'— Bob Saget’s 1998 dark comedy. They'd followed up with Mike Nichols’s 1996 film, “The Birdcage.”

“We wanted to start out with some stuff that’s kind of hard to argue with,” Wilson said. Toni Binanti, the owner of Rudy’s, had a suggestion: they should show “Grumpier Old Men,' the “Grumpy Old Men” sequel, starring Walter Matthau and Sophia Loren. Wilson, who had on a striped button-down shirt and tan cutoffs, made a note in his iPhone. “All right, you've got the Midas touch,” he said.