New York 2026 Review: PAPER TIGER, No Crime, Yet Punishment

New York City, 1986. Irwin Pearl (Miles Teller) and his wife, Hester (Scarlett Johansson), along with their two teenage sons, Scott and Ben, live in Queens, getting by comfortably if not spectacularly.

Soon-to-be 18-year-old Scott plans to go to a good (i.e., costly) college, and Hester’s mom hints at the possibility of the family moving to a better neighborhood. Their personal genie in a bottle arrives in the form of Irwin’s older brother. Gary Pearl (Adam Driver), a former cop turned business owner, is a charming, slightly sleazy bon-vivant who never simply walks into a room: He dances in, bringing gifts, attitude, and offers that can and should be refused but usually aren’t.

Having invited himself to dinner, Gary presents his engineer brother with a business proposal involving a famously polluted Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn and some new entrepreneurs (whom even Irwin immediately recognizes as Russian mafia) who need help bringing their properties there up to the environmental code. This seems like a fundamentally terrible, yet lucrative idea, almost like an embodiment of the American Dream, so coveted in the Reagan era.

So many things have a dream-like quality in Paper Tiger, the latest feature by James Gray, which premiered earlier this year at Cannes and is now serving as the opening film of the New York Film Festival. From the grainy colors of the 35 mm film to the warm, amber light that floods the frame, the film possesses the duality of a vision that is always on the verge of turning into a nightmare. This is also a movie that is brimming with tension, and not only of the Hitchcockian kind, despite some visual references and a memorable scene that takes place in a field.

It’s the tension born out of the lived-in notion that it’s usually the smallest, silliest things that have the ability to blow everything up to smithereens; the road to hell paved with good intentions, and all that. It’s not the scowling, heavily tattooed Russians who are the most present threat to the Pearl family. If anything, the manner in which the mobsters are shown turns them into more of a symbolic threat, a shadow that doesn’t need to be fully defined to be menacing.

Yet, it’s the little things within this family’s dynamics and within their minds that pave the road to a tragedy. A little bit of pride. A little bit of jealousy. And surprisingly, a whole lot of love.

Like in many of his previous works (Little Odessa, The Yards, We Own the Night), Gray mixes the criminal genre with deeply personal, autobiographical elements. There are also Greek myths (the film even opens with an epigraph from Aeschylus’s tragedy Agamemnon) and Fyodor Dostoevsky (whose White Nights Gray previously freely adapted in Two Lovers) woven in. While Irwin might seem like the de facto protagonist (and Teller gives an incredibly lived-in, rounded performance as someone who could be a character in a Coen Brothers movie), it’s Driver’s Gary who unexpectedly comes off as a truly mythological figure.

It’s a great role for Driver: A paradoxical man caught up in his (not unfounded) ambition and conviction that he understands the way the world around him works, an Odysseus who ended up outsmarting himself. Paper Tiger is a paradoxical film itself, as its small-scale, almost intimate story expands to an unexpected scope as it goes along. Its moral dilemmas are straight out of myths, yet everything in it feels real and tangible.

It is also a rare film of a non-horror variety that induces the audience to scream “don’t go there” and “don’t say that” at the screen, knowing full well that this is a kind of story where characters will go to the wrong place at the wrong time, will say the wrong things, and there will be blood.