Paper Tiger Review: Adam Driver Gives the Performance of His Career

Spoiler-free review. Katrina Lee attended the November 2 Los Angeles press screening.

Verdict: A very good James Gray film carried to greatness by one performance. Adam Driver is funny and deeply haunted, often in the same breath, and it is the best work of his career. See it in a theater.

• Director and writer: James Gray
• Cast: Adam Driver (Gary Pearl), Miles Teller (Irwin Pearl), Scarlett Johansson (Hester Pearl), Gavin Goudey (Scott Pearl), Roman Engel (Ben Pearl), Victor Ptak, Cindy Katz, Yavor Vesselinov, Joel Marsh Garland
• Cinematography: Joaquín Baca-Asay (shot on 35mm) · Music: Christopher Spelman · Editor: Scott Morris
• Distributor: Neon · Runtime: 1 hr 55 min
• Festivals: In Competition at Cannes 2026; opening night of the 64th New York Film Festival
• Release: In select theaters Nov. 13, 2026; nationwide Nov. 20, 2026

I knew going in that Paper Tiger was the kind of movie James Gray makes: New York, family, loyalty, a crime story that is really about the people standing next to the crime. The Yards, We Own the Night, Little Odessa. I did not expect to walk out thinking about Adam Driver the way I think about the performances I measure other performances against. That is where I am. Give it a few days and I might still be there.

Queens, 1986, and a deal that looks too good

The Pearls are a middle-class family in Queens. Irwin (Miles Teller) is an engineer with a small business, a careful man who has done everything the way you are supposed to do it. His wife Hester (Scarlett Johansson) holds the house together. Their two sons, Scott (Gavin Goudey) and Ben (Roman Engel), are at the age where they watch everything their father does and decide what kind of man they are going to be.

Then there is Gary (Adam Driver), Irwin’s older brother. Former cop, divorced, flush with money and charm, the fun uncle who makes every room louder. Gary has a business proposition tied up with real estate along the Gowanus Canal, and the partners on the other side of that deal are the Russian mob, newly arrived in a city where the old Italian order is on its way out. Irwin takes the deal. You know where this goes. The film knows you know, and it is not interested in surprising you with the shape of the story. It is interested in what the story does to these people.

That is as far as I will go on plot. Gray’s work is drawn from his own upbringing, and it plays that way: specific, lived-in, never showing off its research.

The performance of Adam Driver’s career

Here is the sentence I keep coming back to: Gary Pearl is the funniest Adam Driver has ever been on screen, and he is also the most haunted. Not in alternating scenes. In the same scene. Sometimes in the same line.

Driver has always been good at size. He fills a frame, he fills a room, he can make a quiet man feel enormous. What he does here is turn that size into a performance of a man performing. Gary is always on. The jokes, the generosity, the way he takes over a dinner table: all of it is a show, and the show is for his brother, for his nephews, and most of all for himself. Then Gray holds on him a beat too long, or puts him in a room with no audience, and you see what the show is covering. A former cop who used to be somebody. A man who got the power taken away and is trying to buy it back. Driver never plays the subtext. He lets you catch it.

I laughed a lot in this movie, and I felt a little guilty every time, which I think is exactly the point. The comedy makes the darkness hit harder, not softer. And when the film finally asks Gary to stop performing, what Driver does with that moment is the reason I am using the phrase “performance of his career” and not a safer one. He has a Gotham Awards nomination already. He should have a lot more than that by March.

Teller makes it a two-hander

None of that works if the brother on the other side of the table is a prop, and Miles Teller is not a prop. This is a real two-hander. Irwin is the harder role in a lot of ways: the quiet one, the one who says yes, the one who has to register every consequence while his brother keeps talking. Teller plays him with a rich internal life that you can read even when he is doing nothing at all. He is funny, too, in a drier register, and the scenes where the two of them fall back into a lifetime of sibling rhythm are the heart of the movie. You believe they grew up in the same house. You believe they have had this argument before.

Every scene between them hums. When the film tightens, it tightens around that relationship, and Teller holds his own against a co-star doing career-best work. That is not a small thing.

Johansson makes every minute count

Scarlett Johansson does not have the screen time the two men do, and she does not need it. Hester is the person in this family who sees clearly, and Johansson plays her without a wasted gesture. She is the standout of the supporting cast: a few scenes, every one of them landing, and a reunion with Driver (their first film together since Marriage Story) that gives the house scenes a charge the movie would miss without her. I wanted more of her, which is the best complaint you can have about a performance.

Gray, on film, in his city

Gray shot Paper Tiger on 35mm with Joaquín Baca-Asay, and the film does not look like a recreation of 1986. It looks like something that was found there. The Queens interiors, the canal at night, the tall grass in a sequence that is going to get taught in film schools: it all has weight and grain and shadow, and the tension never lets up, even in the lightest moments. Christopher Spelman’s score knows when to disappear.

Is this Gray’s best film? I am not sure it is, and I do not think it needs to be. It is a very good one, made by a filmmaker who knows exactly what he is doing, with a lead performance that lifts the whole thing onto another level. I have minor quibbles and no major ones. I spent two hours completely inside it.

Verdict

Paper Tiger is a very good James Gray crime drama with a great Adam Driver performance at the center of it, the kind of turn that stays with you for days. Funny, haunted, and completely in control, it is the best he has ever been, and Teller and Johansson make sure he is not doing it alone. The film is going to land hard with anyone who loves this kind of New York story. Driver is going to land with everyone.

The Nerd Wire verdict: See it. On film, if you can find it.

Paper Tiger opens in select theaters Nov. 13 and nationwide Nov. 20 from Neon.

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