Paper Tiger: Adam Driver brings a dangerous charm to James Gray’s tense crime thriller

• Reviewed from the 2026 Cannes Film Festival

James Gray is the Jerry Lewis of international cinema: in that his films don’t tend to be very funny and the French love him. With Gray’s latest showing in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, he has returned to familiar ground. Miles Teller plays Irwin, a nebbish dad from the suburbs who is already fixing storm windows in the middle of summer and getting his sons out of bed way too early. He’s married to Hester (Scarlett Johansson) and is relatively content even though there is always the pressure to move out of the city entirely. But relatively content does not good drama make and so enter Gary (Adam Driver), Irwin’s flashier older brother, who drives a nicer car, has made a stack as a consultant and brightens up the house when he visits with his largesse and humour. 

Gary has a proposal for Irwin. Come in with him as a consultant on a stretch of property along a polluted canal and use his engineering skills to help the Russians, who have just taken over the area, comply with environmental regulations. Unfortunately, the Russians moving in are not nice people and complying with regulations, environmental or otherwise, is the last thing on their minds. When naive Irwin pops over in the middle of the night to tell them a piece of heavy equipment is positioned badly, they not only assault him, they threaten the life of his two boys as well who Irwin has unwisely brought along. 

How should Irwin respond? Should he call the police? What has his brother got him into? Has Irwin put his family in danger? And as if this wasn’t bad enough, Hester is having medical difficulties that she’s keeping to herself. Everyone in the family has something they’re worried about and dealing with more or less separately. The boys – played by Gavin Goudey and Roman Engel – have been traumatised by their experience but also drawn together. Their mother is surprised to find them sleeping in the same bed the next day, given their usual form of communication has been snark and childish violence. 

Paper Tiger is the kind of low-stakes crime drama we don’t get enough of these days and which James Gray excels at. We’re in the territory of Little Odessa (1994), The Yards (2000) and We Own the Night (2007). No one is going to John Wick their way out of their problems. We might think Irwin naive for not running the minute he sees the very obviously dangerous Russian mobsters, but this film is a coming-of-age story not only for the boys who witness their father’s confusion and frustration, but also in a more general there-goes-the-neighbourhood way. It’s the 1980s and the Italian mobsters have moved out, Gary tells his brother, almost wistfully, but Irwin isn’t the only one who is naive. If Irwin has led a sheltered existence, Gary is also out of touch and hasn’t fully understood the level of criminality and potential violence he’s playing with. What was his operation anyway? Was he trying to shake down the Russians? The old rules, as someone tries to warn him, no longer apply.  

This is a handsome, serious film and Driver in particular arrives with snap and flair. His character wears a dangerous charm in the flush of what feels like the first of many divorces. Teller is the most anguished: his role as a father protecting his children – those storm windows won’t help – leading him to question his own sense of self. Johansson perhaps has the least developed role, lumbered with shouldering a hunk of unearned melodrama along with a wig that has produced the serious danger of having to put Margaret Thatcher and Scarlett Johansson in the same sentence.  

Unlike Martin Scorsese’s needle-drop driven crime films, Gray uses a downbeat orchestral score from Christopher Spelman that builds on the director’s ambition for the film to be seen as a Greek tragedy – it opens with a line from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon – and cinematographer Joaquín Baca-Asay’s camera eschews the highlighter pen fluorescents of the decade, preferring a sombre woody ochre, which makes sense. People don’t redecorate their houses every decade to keep up with the times.  

While not surpassing his best work – We Own the Night remains that for this critic – Paper Tiger is a tense thriller about ordinary people falling unnecessarily into a world they don’t understand and being punished in a way out of proportion to their misstep. It humanises and has empathy for its characters, regardless of their actions or their ultimate fate.