James Gray had left the comfort zone of the native New York he chronicled over the first two decades of his career, sending Charlie Hunnam, Robert Pattinson, and Tom Holland into the Amazon jungle for The Lost City of Z and launching Brad Pitt into space with Ad Astra. With his previous feature, Armageddon Time, the wizened filmmaker—whose borne the reputation as a deeply humane screenwriter, quietly piercing storyteller, and cinematic historian of his birthplace and Jewish-Russian heritage—returned with a family drama fit for even the most tender audiences. With his newest, Paper Tiger, he returns to the roots planted in his first three films (Little Odessa, The Yards, We Own the Night): gritty, mafia-ridden crime in the Empire City’s fabled underworld.
Gary Pearl (Adam Driver) is a divorced, retired NYPD cop who wields his backing from the powerful, shady municipal institution to turn a much larger profit from security advising for whoever has the money to hire him. He’s the kind of confident, wheeling-and-dealing socialite who can casually afford to have Peter Luger deliver a porterhouse for six to the suburban outreaches of Queens’ 75th street in Jackson Heights—a few miles from where Gray grew up in Flushing, and where Gary’s civil-engineer brother Irwin (Miles Teller) lives a more humble family life with his wife Hester (Scarlett Johansson) and two teenage sons Scott and Ben (Gavin Goudey and Roman Engel). This is a Jewish family neither involved in nor looking for trouble.
But it doesn’t matter who Gary is, how much money he has, or what kind of leverage he touts across the city. A new era of mob life is arising at the height of the Cold War in 1986 south and central Brooklyn, where the Russian mafia arrives in droves to brutally establish a new order of respect and rule-making that goes beyond the NYPD, the old-guard Italian mafia, and any other prominent Gothamites that ran the city behind closed doors. The Russian mob renders moot the socio-political dynamic of the ‘60s and ‘70s in which Gary still operates. But he’s too used to the old game to see that the paper tiger is not made of paper after all; rather, an imported steel the likes of which he can’t imagine.
And it doesn’t matter how hard Irwin tries to stay out of Gary’s business dealings. Gary is too smooth, self-assured, and fast for Irwin, who you can tell has spent a lifetime caving to his older brother’s wishes, which always come with a gift in tow (a new car, $10,000, etc.) accompanied by Gary’s loveble, sweethearted nature, which seems genuinely hard to reject. But one can tell by Irwin’s demeanor that he’s never dealt with any kind of mob. That’s until Gary arrives with a consulting engineering pitch for cleaning up the Gowanus Canal, Brooklyn’s most polluted waterway for more than 100 years. The only problem? The Russians own it now.
What starts as a congenial deal between the brothers and Russians devolves into chaos when Irwin innocently shows up at the canal with his two boys one night to teach them a little something about his line of work, only to discover the goons dumping oil. This incidentally stirs a whole heap of trouble that Gary can only fix through ruthless mob boss Simeon Bogoyavich (Victor Ptak). Meanwhile, Hester wrestles alone with sudden health issues that threaten to unroot her crucial role in the Pearl family. What unfolds is a masterfully measured, character-driven, quintessentially subtle James Gray mob picture.
A real where’s-where of south and central Brooklyn replete with iconic restaurants, bars, and neighborhoods (something any New Yorker or New York-lover is bound to get giddy over), Paper Tiger isn’t quite the triumph that Gray managed in similarly set and themed work (The Yards still wears that gold, with We Own the Night taking silver), yet it’s certainly something to behold, the type of film that doesn’t take things so far as desired while lingering still. It plants seeds of lavish characterization, heart-wrenching drama, and gutting tension that leaves one thinking about these people, these places, and the world we live in with a raw sting, as if all of it, down to the bone, is culled directly from history, not a single shrewd detail made up.
Driver, Teller, and Johansson are all equally fantastic under the direction of Gray and his brilliant screenplay. Joaquín Baca-Asay––returning after We Own the Night and Two Lovers––delivers an inspired vintage aesthetic that draws out Gray’s now-retro directorial tendencies (read: the opposite of a Netflix movie). Wardrobes and sets feel more found than created, a testament to the work of costume designer Amy Roth and production designer Happy Massee.
All said, a few elements dangle. Scott Morris’ edit, which could’ve used another pass, carries moments of deadweight. And while the ending is engrossing, one can’t help noticing that it’s a bit uninspired, copied directly from one of the most prominent crime films of all time, and nearly plagiarizing one of his own. Yet Paper Tiger is a welcome addition to the oeuvre and one that has potential to mature into something even greater. The man simply knows how to tell a New York story.
Paper Tiger premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival and will be released by NEON.