Paper Tiger review: James Gray returns to Brooklyn’s mob era

By Tom Whitfield

Paper Tiger premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival and opens in theaters on November 13. NEON will release James Gray’s film, according to The Film Stage’s Cannes coverage, which first published the review as part of that coverage.

After chronicling native New York through much of his first two decades, Gray left the city. The Film Stage notes that The Lost City of Z sent Charlie Hunnam, Robert Pattinson and Tom Holland into the Amazon, while Ad Astra put Brad Pitt in space.

His previous feature, Armageddon Time, was a family drama. Paper Tiger returns Gray to the gritty, Mafia-ruled Empire City of his first three films: Little Odessa, The Yards and We Own the Night.

The review describes Gray as a deeply humane screenwriter, a quietly piercing storyteller and a cinematic historian of New York and his Jewish-Russian heritage. Its praise sets a test for Paper Tiger: can a restrained family drama sustain that reputation without the force of Gray’s better-known crime films?

The Film Stage introduces Gary Pearl (Adam Driver) as a divorced, retired NYPD officer who turns his connections with the institution into lucrative security advice. Gary’s influence reaches clients with money. It also gives him the confidence to order a Peter Luger porterhouse for six and send it to suburban Queens.

His brother Irwin (Miles Teller), a civil engineer, lives with Hester (Scarlett Johansson) and teenage sons Scott and Ben (Gavin Goudey and Roman Engel) on 75th Street in Jackson Heights. The review places the family in more modest circumstances a few miles from Flushing, where Gray grew up, and calls them Jewish, uninvolved and unwilling to seek trouble.

Irwin has spent his life yielding to Gary, the review says. Gary softens his demands with gifts, including a new car and $10,000, and with a sweethearted manner that makes refusal hard. Irwin’s lack of experience with organized crime becomes the family’s vulnerability.

That vulnerability surfaces in 1986, at the height of the Cold War. The Film Stage describes Russian Mafia groups arriving across south and central Brooklyn to establish a brutal new order. Their authority exceeds the NYPD, the old Italian Mafia and the other Gothamites who once controlled the city from behind closed doors.

Gary still operates through the social-political rules of the 1960s and 1970s. He fails to understand that the “paper tiger” confronting him resembles imported steel, not paper. The Russian influx makes his older leverage obsolete.

Gary then approaches Irwin with a consulting-engineering proposal for the Gowanus Canal. The Film Stage calls the waterway Brooklyn’s most polluted for more than 100 years and says the Russians now own it. A seemingly congenial family arrangement therefore begins with an impossible division of power.

The arrangement collapses when Irwin takes his sons to the canal and finds the Russians dumping oil. According to the review, Gary calls in ruthless mob boss Simeon Bogoyavich (Victor Ptak) to repair the problem. Meanwhile, Hester confronts health issues that threaten her central place in the Pearl family.

The Film Stage calls the result a “masterfully measured, character-driven, quintessentially subtle James Gray mob picture.” That judgment rests on the reviewer’s claim that Gray develops lavish characterization, heart-wrenching drama and mounting tension through details that feel drawn from history rather than invention.

What does Gray’s return to Brooklyn change?

For viewers, it offers a more controlled version of Gray’s New York crime melodrama, not a reinvention. Recognizable boroughs and a family crisis test Gary’s assumptions. The practical question is whether the measured character work can outweigh an ending that the review regards as derivative.

The reviewer says the film’s real restaurants, bars and neighborhoods give it a “where’s-where” quality for New Yorkers. Yet the verdict remains qualified. The Film Stage treats The Yards as the gold standard and We Own the Night as silver, placing Paper Tiger below both without dismissing it.

The review says the film does not push as far as the reviewer would like, but it lingers on its people and places. Its praise of lavish characterization, heart-wrenching drama and raw tension gives the restraint a purpose beyond simple pacing.

The Film Stage praises Gray’s screenplay and describes Driver, Teller and Johansson as equally fantastic. Joaquín Baca-Asay, returning after We Own the Night and Two Lovers, gives the film an inspired vintage aesthetic that suits Gray’s retro instincts and, in the review’s phrase, feels opposite to a Netflix movie.

Costume designer Amy Roth and production designer Happy Massee extend that sense of found detail. The Film Stage says the wardrobes and sets look more found than constructed, reinforcing the film’s claim to historical texture.

Two flaws remain. Scott Morris’s edit contains what the reviewer calls deadweight and could have used another pass. More seriously, the reviewer finds the ending engrossing but uninspired and copied from a prominent crime film. The review even says it nearly plagiarizes one of Gray’s own films, but it does not identify either title.

Even so, The Film Stage calls Paper Tiger a welcome addition with the potential to mature into something greater. It ends by declaring, “The man simply knows how to tell a New York story.” NEON’s November 13 theatrical arrival will test whether that command of place can outlast the derivative ending the review identifies.