James Gray’s Paper Tiger premieres at Cannes competing for Palme d’Or

Director James Gray’s latest film, “Paper Tiger,” premiered Saturday at the Cannes Film Festival, where it is competing for the Palme d’Or. The 1980s-set crime drama stars Miles Teller as Irwin Pearl, a working-class family man in Queens, New York, whose life is upended when his brother, a former NYPD officer played by Adam Driver, draws them into a dangerous scheme with Russian organized crime.

The film follows Irwin, who lives contentedly with his wife, played by Scarlett Johansson, and their two sons. His brother Gary proposes a business opportunity involving waste oil collection from the polluted Gowanus Canal. What begins as a seemingly legitimate venture quickly escalates into violent threats from Russian operatives, putting the entire family under siege. A tense home invasion sequence midway through the film represents a high point of suspense, though some critics note the narrative ultimately plays its choices safely, arriving at a conventionally resolved ending.

In conversations at the festival, Gray revealed the project was initially conceived as a kind of sequel to his 2022 film “Armageddon Time,” but was reworked to focus on the operatic dynamic between the two...