Review: Paper Tiger
by David Katz
- CANNES 2026: James Gray’s latest New York tragedy, starring Adam Driver and Miles Teller as fraternal business partners, is one part shoddiness to several parts sublimity
If we’re going to continue investigating the strange case of James Gray, the Cannes Film Festival is arguably our ground zero. The festival’s selections are heavily indebted to the international arthouse sales market, yet despite this important focus, they still wield a taste-making, or king-making role: to be harsh, why else would Gray have been selected so often, given the broad audience rejection of the majority of his films? (France, of course, being the exception.) A byword for skilful film direction is tonal control, or “tone management”; his films – this latest Cannes-competing one, Paper Tiger, included – can feel like a deliberate pile-up of dissonant touches. Yet for his band of passionate acolytes, this reviewer included, those dissonances can resolve into an utter emotional consonance.
Gray’s been around this narrative and thematic block before, with his past Cannes entries We Own the Night and The Yards, but here, he infuses their hardboiled crime-flick style with the familial warmth and confessionalism of Armageddon Time, a highly autobiographical film where he depicted his troubled Jewish-American family, resident in Queens, New York. Despite his preference for a kind of classical dramatic shorthand, and character binaries (in past films: cop/criminal; civilised/savage; white/African-American) that many have considered naive and reductive, the central relationship between brothers Gary (Adam Driver) and Irwin Pearl (Miles Teller) is very textured and nuanced, bespeaking years of hurt, competitiveness, inherited trauma and, more importantly, unconditional affection.
We’re in 1986, with the USA’s transformative Reagan era in full flow. Irwin is a successful but still financially squeezed engineer and handyman; Gary is a former NYPD cop who transitioned into lucrative security consulting for important civic venues in the city, such as the Port Authority. He’s “flash”, with slicked-back hair and a blocky, intermittently beeping 1980s “pager”, but he was known in the force as “Mr Clean”, meaning he didn’t take bribes: his natural inclination to hustle was always bound by an ethical code, however loose. Gary spots a potential consulting opportunity involving the renovation of the city’s outer-borough waterways, which are now owned by Russian immigrants; they’re seen as better potential business partners than the Italian mob, who previously ran them. They are naïve – albeit realistically so for such aspirational strivers – so their growing business relationship with these new owners, under the banner of freshly established oil companies (themselves having Mafiya connections), gets them into absolutely deep shit.
Scarlett Johansson is Irwin’s wife, Hester, who gets an important subplot quite divided from the rest of the story, involving a terminal health issue, but she’s still a moral conscience (although “superego” would be taking it too far) to her husband’s id and Gary’s ego. Scary confrontation sequences ensue, between the family and the mob, brother and brother, wife and husband; there’s a fantastic climactic car chase, followed by a “stationary” foot chase in a cornfield that cannily steals from North by Northwest. It’s pure Greek tragedy – with an opening on-screen epigraph from Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, at that – distressed with boilerplate crime-movie clichés more at home in direct-to-video action.
Paper Tiger is now Gray’s sixth film in competition here; each previous time, he’s returned home empty-handed and often dejected, and in two cases (The Yards and The Immigrant), the dreadful Harvey Weinstein sabotaged their eventual releases. The new movie will be manna for his fans; many others will have extremely justifiable objections, political and aesthetic; and newcomers to his work will be super-curious. Swaggering, awkward and powerful, it’s a tiger not for taming.
Paper Tiger is a co-production by the USA, Brazil and Italy, staged by Keep Your Head Productions, RT Features and Leone Film Group. The Veterans oversees its international sales.
Photogallery 16/05/2026: Cannes 2026 - Paper Tiger
22 pictures available. Swipe left or right to see them all.
© 2026 Fabrizio de Gennaro for Cineuropa - fadege.it, @fadege.it
Did you enjoy reading this article? Please subscribe to our newsletter to receive more stories like this directly in your inbox.
