James Gray's Paper Tiger opened the 64th New York Film Festival at Alice Tully Hall on September 25, with distributor Neon presenting the film in 35mm. The move signals the formal start of an awards campaign behind the film Gray calls his most personal in decades.
The film had its world premiere in the main competition at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, where it received a ten-minute standing ovation. Set in 1986 Queens and Brooklyn, it follows Irwin Pearl (Miles Teller), an engineer whose ambitions for a stable middle-class life are destabilized when his older brother Gary (Adam Driver), a former police officer, pulls him into a scheme involving the Russian mafia and illegal oil dumping near the Gowanus Canal. The fallout endangers Irwin's wife Hester (Scarlett Johansson) and their two sons.
Cinematographer Joaquin Baca-Asay shot the film entirely on 35mm. It opens with an epigraph from Aeschylus. "The Cannes Film Festival has its magic, but it is a very strange environment in which to premiere a movie," Gray told Deadline. "It's a New York movie. It's the right place for this to be."
This is Gray's first time opening NYFF and the first time he has had dedicated Oscar support from a distributor. Neon is campaigning Teller for Lead Actor, Driver and Johansson in Supporting categories, and Gray for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. Paper Tiger opens in limited release on November 13.
