James Gray‘s Paper Tiger will get its North American premiere as the opening night film at the 2026 New York Film Festival.
The crime thriller, which is set for a gala screening on Sept. 25, stars Adam Driver, Miles Teller and Scarlett Johansson. The film had its world premiere at Cannes and will be released by Neon in November.
Gray’s latest semi-fictionalized take on his family life growing up in the 1980s in Queens stars Johansson and Teller as parents Hester and Irwin when Irwin’s flashy brother, Gary (Adam Driver), pulls Irwin into a shady moneymaking endeavor involving the Russian mafia, endangering Hester and Irwin’s sons.
In his Cannes review, The Hollywood Reporter‘s chief film critic David Rooney calls Paper Tiger, “a drama of almost overwhelming power.”
“Calling it a sequel would be reductive, but the haunting drama is a companion piece to Gray’s 2022 film, Armageddon Time, again rooted in the director’s childhood. But it’s closer both thematically and tonally to his brooding 1994 debut feature, Little Odessa,” Rooney writes. “That lends Gray’s ninth and arguably best film a gratifying full-circle symmetry.
