James Gray has always been an intensely personal filmmaker, but his last movie, “Armageddon Time” (2022), took a turn into the explicitly autobiographical — it was all about his experience growing up in dowdy middle-class Queens in the early ’80s, a setting that allowed Gray to take forays into themes of race and pop culture and the shadow of Donald Trump (whose imperious father was a character in the movie). So it’s a bit of a surprise to see Gray, in “Paper Tiger,” return to more or less that same setting and a comparable atmosphere of mouthy, close-knit Jewish domestic psychodrama. “Paper Tiger” is like a spiritual sequel to “Armageddon Time.” The difference is that the new movie has the dread-fueled engine of a neo-New Hollywood vérité thriller.
“Paper Tiger” is set in the late ’80s, which means that it’s even more ramped up with material anxiety. And whereas the father in “Armageddon Time,” brilliantly played by Jeremy Strong, was a dweeb sitting on a keg of anger, in the new movie the father, Irwin Pearl (Miles Teller), is an earnest reservoir engineer who’s as sweet and passive and trusting as he looks. The movie is about how Irwin and his brother, a high-rolling ex-cop named Gary (Adam Driver), get involved in a financial scheme that ensnares them in the tentacles of the Russian mob.
