James Gray’s Paper Tiger draws Cannes acclaim with Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson

James Gray’s Paper Tiger arrived in Cannes with the kind of bruised authority that has become rare in theatrical adult drama. The film premiered in the festival’s main Competition on May 16, where it was in contention for the Palme d’Or, and the audience response was immediate: a standing ovation that reports placed between six and 10 minutes.

Gray returns to Cannes 30 years after Little Odessa premiered there in 1994, and Paper Tiger feels built from the same outer-borough terrain that made his early work so distinctive. Set in Queens, New York, the film follows two brothers chasing the American Dream before a dangerous Russian mafia scheme pulls their family into terror and tests the bond between them. Review coverage describes the movie as semi-fictionalized and rooted in Gray’s own family life in mid-1980s Queens, a detail that gives the crime story its ache and its emotional weight.

The cast gives Gray the kind of star power that arthouse cinema increasingly needs to command attention. Adam Driver leads alongside Scarlett Johansson and Miles Teller, and the film reunites Driver and Johansson seven years after Marriage Story. Driver’s performance has already drawn unusually strong praise, with early reviews calling it career-best work and linking his intensity to the film’s tragic, operatic force. In a marketplace crowded with franchise spectacle and streaming distractions, that kind of performance still matters as one of the few reliable ways for a serious drama to break through theatrically.

Paper Tiger also lands as a signal about what kinds of films Cannes still sees as worth elevating. The festival had already included the title in its official Competition selection when it announced the slate on April 9, and Gray’s return to the Queens and Brooklyn milieu of his earlier films suggests a filmmaker doubling down on scale, family conflict and social pressure rather than retreating from them. The movie’s mix of immigrant aspiration, criminal menace and domestic strain places it squarely in Gray’s long-running interest in the costs of trying to get ahead in New York.

For Cannes, Paper Tiger was more than a premiere. It was a reminder that star-led prestige cinema can still generate heat when the material is this specific and this severe, and that Gray’s hard-edged view of family, class and the American Dream still has enough force to command a theater full of skeptical festivalgoers.