James Gray‘s ninth feature film returns him to his New York roots — here, to the boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn in the 1980s. His Cannes Film Festival debut “Paper Tiger,” out from Neon on November 13 after opening the New York Film Festival in September, is one of the year’s best-directed movies. It’s a Greek tragedy set against the Russian mafia, starring a wounded Miles Teller and often-terrifying Adam Driver as brothers in a feud that goes as deep as blood — and puts Scarlett Johansson, as Teller’s wife, in the line of fire. Watch the first teaser trailer for the film below.
In “Paper Tiger,” former police officer Gary Pearl (Driver) brings his brother Irwin (Teller) in on a deal that turns out to be too good to be true — and one that involves the Russian mobsters conspiring alongside New York City’s docks. Meanwhile, Hester (Johansson) has a secret of her own that her family’s fraying bonds only further push her to repress. But as with any James Gray film, there are life-altering consequences on the other side of impulsive decision-making for the sake of the American dream.
And “Paper Tiger” features at least a few sequences of precisely calibrated violence as chilling as in any American movie since “No Country for Old Men” — abetted by cinematographer Joaquín Baca-Asay, a collaborator of Gray’s dating back to 2007’s “We Own the Night.” Editor Scott Morris (Gray’s “Armageddon Time”) also chisels “Paper Tiger” to its most essential cuts — a wave of welcome levity in an age of onscreen excess.
Gray’s Brighton Beach-set directorial debut, the crime thriller “Little Odessa” with Tim Roth, was just released by the Criterion Collection — and its landscape of the Russian-Jewish mafia tearing up a family at the roots makes for a fitting full circle timed to Gray’s latest.
IndieWire’s David Ehrlich called “Paper Tiger” “a Jewish-American tragedy in a teapot that — like all of the writer/director’s best films — is both sweepingly mythic and hauntingly personal all at once” in his rave review out of Cannes.
Watch the teaser trailer for “Paper Tiger” ahead of its North American premiere at the New York Film Festival on September 25 at Lincoln Center.
