‘Paper Tiger’ Review: James Gray Delivers a Thriller Bursting with Danger … and Heart
James Gray's 'Paper Tiger' is a suspenseful crime thriller set in 1986 Queens, blending danger with deep family emotion. The film follows a family drawn into conflict with Russian mobsters after a construction job goes awry. Despite its tense sequences, the story emphasizes familial bonds and personal history.
- ▪The film stars Miles Teller, Scarlett Johansson, and Adrien Brody as a family entangled with Russian gangsters in 1986 New York.
- ▪'Paper Tiger' premiered in the Main Competition at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival.
- ▪The story is semi-autobiographical, drawing on James Gray's own family experiences growing up in Queens.
- ▪Gary, played by Adrien Brody, is a former cop with questionable current affiliations who believes the Russian mob is easily manipulated.
- ▪A nighttime visit to a polluted canal exposes Irwin and his sons to illegal activities, putting the family in grave danger.
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| Original publisher | TheWrap |
| Canonical URL | https://www.thewrap.com/creative-content/movies/paper-tiger-review-james-gray-cannes/ |
| Publication time | Sat, 16 May 2026 21:55:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-16T22:10:19.058Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-16T22:10:19.058Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 9ovECCr8baOq |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
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Home > Creative Content > Movies ‘Paper Tiger’ Review: James Gray Delivers a Thriller Bursting with Danger … and Heart Cannes 2026: Miles Teller, Scarlett Johansson and Adrien Brody star as family members who get tangled up with Russian gangsters Steve Pond May 16, 2026 @ 2:55 PM Share on Social Media Share on Facebook Share on X (formerly Twitter) Share on LinkedIn Share on Email "Paper Tiger" (Neon) James Gray knows how to mess with genre. His last film, 2022’s “Armageddon Time,” was a coming-of-age memoir, but a notably unsentimental entry is what is usually a sentimental genre. And his new one, “Paper Tiger,” has all the trappings of a crime thriller, but it flips the equation from four years ago: It’s a very sentimental entry in a typically unsentimental genre.
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