Adam Driver, Miles Teller, and Scarlett Johansson lead James Gray’s new American epic, Paper Tiger, which debuted at Cannes and makes its North American premiere this Friday to open the 64th New York Film Festival. The project finds Gray returning to his native New York and, for a second straight feature, exploring its working-class milieu circa the 1980s and with a narrative redolent of earlier crime pictures. No less important to note is cinematographer Joaquín Baca-Asay once again teaming with the director, crafting an aesthetic that is largely gone from the modern cinema.
As Luke Hicks said in our Critic’s Pick review out of Cannes, “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.”
Here’s the official synopsis: “In James Gray’s deeply felt and intense drama, two brothers become entangled in a scheme that turns out to be too good to be true. As they try to navigate their way through the dangerous world of the Russian mafiya, family bonds begin to fray with life-altering consequences.”
Watch the new trailer below ahead of a November 13 release:
