James Gray’s Cannes-premiering crime thriller Paper Tiger will open the 64th New York Film Festival in its North American premiere on September 25.
The fest’s parent, Film at Lincoln Center, announced the gala debut of the Neon release at Alice Tully Hall with Gray and members of cast and crew. Adam Driver, Miles Teller, and Scarlett Johansson star.
Set in 1986 Queens and Brooklyn, the film is a New York story charting the tragic domestic fallout after family man and engineer Irwin (Teller), who aspires to middle-class comforts, is pulled into a shady deal by his brother, Gary (Driver). A former NYPD cop. Gary thinks he can make a killing on a scheme with Russian mafia dumping oil by the Gowanus Canal. Instead, he ends up endangering his brother, as well as Irwin’s sons (Gavin Goudey and Roman Engel) and wife Hester (Johansson). Deadline’s review called the film “riveting.”
Paper Tiger premiered in competition at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival this year and is Gray’s fourth film to screen at NYFF following The Immigrant (2013); The Lost City of Z (2016); and Armageddon Time (2022).
“I’m immensely grateful to be welcomed back to this remarkable festival,” said Gray. “This deeply personal film is rooted in New York City; from my upbringing to life-changing family experiences. To be here, at the heart of art and cinema, with our cast and crew—many of whom are New Yorkers—is a privilege. Thank you to the entire New York Film Festival team. It is an honor.”
“James Gray has been a fixture at the New York Film Festival for many years, and we are thrilled to welcome him back as our Opening Night filmmaker with a career-best achievement,” said NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. “Paper Tiger is a movie of immense emotional power, at once lovingly realistic and grandly mythic, and it confirms that James is one of the great New York filmmakers—one of the great filmmakers, period—of our time.”
NYFF, launched in 1963, offers a curated selected of what programmers consider the most significant international films culled from festivals over the year, with a number of world premieres, revivals and talks
The 2026 edition runs from September 25 through October 12.
The festival’s Main Slate Selection Committee is chaired by Lim, and includes Florence Almozini, Justin Chang, and Rachel Rosen.
James Gray was born in New York City, grew up in Queens, and attended the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television. He made his directorial debut in 1994 at the age of 25 with Little Odessa, which received the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival. Gray then wrote and directed The Yards in 2000, his first feature with Joaquin Phoenix, who would become a frequent collaborator and go on to star in his next three films: We Own The Night (2007), Two Lovers (2008), and The Immigrant (2013), all of which screened in competition at Cannes.
Gray’s The Lost City Of Z (2016) starring Charlie Hunnam, Sienna Miller, Robert Pattinson, and Tom Holland was released in theaters by Amazon and Bleecker Street in 2017. Disney/Fox’s Ad Astra, directed by Gray and starring Brad Pitt and Tommy Lee Jones, had its world premiere in competition at Venice and was released in theaters in 2019. Focus Features’ Armageddon Time (2022)—which Gray directed, wrote, and produced—was inspired by his own childhood in 1980s Queens also premiered Cannes.
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