Paper Tiger

A crime film set in Queens in 1986. There are two brothers. Gary is a former police officer; he has left the job and is short of money. Isaac is an engineer, the one who works steadily and stays away from risk. Gary finds a way. At the start it looks small and controllable, it draws his brother in, and before long it enters the interest of the Russian mafia. What the film is interested in is not the crime but the difference between the two brothers: one believes rising quickly is possible, the other does not, and cannot leave his brother alone. The period is built in detail. Mid-1980s New York, immigrant neighbourhoods and the Soviet-rooted organised crime growing in those years are the film's ground. Adam Driver plays Gary and Miles Teller plays Isaac. Scarlett Johansson is in the cast. James Gray wrote and directed; he is known for family and crime stories set in New York, and this film continues that line. It was shown in competition at the Cannes Film Festival. It opens in North America in November 2026, so at the time these lines were written the film had not yet gone into wide release. Who it is for: anyone who likes slow-moving dramas fed by the American crime cinema of the 1970s. Who it is not for: anyone expecting action from the genre; Gray's films use violence rarely and for consequence.