Adam Driver Delivers Career-Best Turn in James Gray's 'Paper Tiger'

Adam Driver gives a career-best performance in James Gray's "Paper Tiger," which premiered in Competition at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival and reaches US theaters on Friday, November 13 via NEON. The film is a Jewish-American tragedy set in Queens in the late summer of 1986, two months before the Mets win the World Series.

The plot turns on a bad decision. Irwin Pearl (Miles Teller), a nebbishy engineer, is lured by his older brother Gary (Driver) — a divorced ex-cop who swans around the city in a blue Mercedes — into a business venture along the Gowanus Canal. Gary neglects to mention that the venture belongs to the Russian mafiya. Irwin sketches diagrams for scary men, takes home a healthy paycheck, then takes his two sons to scope out the canal one night, where they witness the Russians illegally dumping waste. The mob doesn't like that. In the aftermath of a stick-up, Gary is given a week to make the problem go away — a task that would strain even a man with access to $125,000.

What does Gray do with the material?

Plenty. The review, originally published May 16, 2026 during the Cannes festival, calls the film "deft and devastating" — a parable about the American Dream, a thriller about a working-class schmuck mixed up with organized crime, and, at its core, a study of family as the ultimate devil's bargain. Gray opens with a quote from Aeschylus — "Let there be wealth without tears; enough for the wise man who will ask no further" — and an opening shot surveying the same reedy marshland from the end of "We Own the Night." The project was first conceived as a direct sequel to 2022's "Armageddon Time."

Driver's Gary gives the film its soul. The review describes his performance as one that "stretches across flash, menace, and pure sincerity like a foot stepping down on a bed of nails without drawing blood." Gary strides into Irwin and Hester's living room after months of radio silence, hauling a fully catered feast from Peter Luger's Steak House. He only knows how to show affection by offering to share in his apparent success. "We've never played in the dirt," Gary tells Irwin while lying about the Gowanus deal.

How do Teller and Johansson fare?

Teller, per the review, has rededicated his career to cosplaying as "Lost in America"-era Albert Brooks — a canny way of aging up the nonconformist spunk of his "Whiplash" and "The Spectacular Now" years. Scarlett Johansson plays Hester, Irwin's wife, kept in the dark for her own protection and thrust into a secret crucible of her own. Her performance grows "more hollowed out and heartsick with every scene" until it assumes a void-like power — a comparison the review draws to Brad Pitt in the farthest reaches of outer space, a nod to Gray's "Ad Astra."

The real tragedy, the review argues, isn't that the mob tears the brothers apart. It's that it brings them together. The worse things get, the more the film exposes the bond that allowed things to go wrong in the first place — a dynamic Gray transposes onto Irwin's sons. Everything that happens "stems from an inextricable braid of love and leverage."

It's a small, maybe slightly underfunded movie, buttressed by exquisite setpieces — a nightmarish home invasion rendered as shadowplay, a climactic shoutout to Gray's earlier work — and shot on 35mm by Joaquín Baca-Asay, whose period detail runs from beepers to TaB cans. But it runs on the frictions inside Driver's performance. "We already had everything," Irwin eventually mutters. The deepest cut, the review concludes, is that for the first time, it leaves him begging for more. Expect this one to sit near the top of year-end lists.