Paper Tiger

James Gray has spent three decades chronicling family, loyalty and immigrant ambition across the films that made his name — The Yards, We Own the Night, Two Lovers, The Immigrant and Armageddon Time. Paper Tiger, written and directed by Gray, premiered in the main competition of the 79th Cannes Film Festival in 2026 and was acquired by Neon; produced as a US–Brazil–Italy co-production, it reunites him with the kind of fraternal crime story he has long made his own.

The film follows two brothers pursuing the American Dream who become entangled in a scheme that looks too good to be true, and find themselves drawn into corruption, violence and the orbit of the Russian "Mafiya." Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson and Miles Teller head a starry cast, and Gray surrounds them with his customary burnished, classical craft — a New York of debts, family obligation and slow-tightening dread.

Cannes reviews were admiring if divided, the film holding an 83% score on Rotten Tomatoes; Variety praised its atmosphere while questioning its plausibility. For Gray, it is a return to the criminal-family territory of his earliest work, mounted on a larger canvas and with a marquee cast — a classical American crime drama screened, fittingly, on the world stage of the Croisette.