Paper Tiger Trailer: Driver and Johansson Enter the 1986 Mob

Neon has released the full Paper Tiger trailer, a new crime thriller from writer-director James Gray starring Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson, and Miles Teller. The two-minute trailer, which dropped this week, offers the clearest look yet at the 1986 Queens saga about two brothers who get pulled into the orbit of the Russian mafia. The film marks Gray's return to the crime genre after years working in very different territory, and it arrives with a heavyweight cast and a true story behind it.

The trailer opens quietly. Miles Teller's Irwin Pearl welcomes his older brother Gary, played by Driver, into his home, and for a moment everything looks like a family reunion. That warmth curdles fast. Irwin tells Gary about a business deal tied to Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal that went wrong: "We had a problem down at the canal and it's led to some things. I walked in on something they didn't want me to see." Driver's Gary, an ex-cop who now works as a fixer around New York, brushes it off with false confidence: "These people don't trust anyone. They'll huff and puff but they're not gonna touch me." Irwin's reply is four words: "What about me?" It carries the film's central tension: two brothers discovering that one bad decision can outrun both of them.

A family story pulled from real life

What separates Paper Tiger from the usual mob picture is its origin. According to coverage of the film's production, Gray has said the story is loosely based on his own family's encounter with the Russian mafia in 1980s New York. That personal thread runs through the official synopsis, which describes two brothers who "become entangled in a scheme that turns out to be too good to be true. As they try to navigate their way through the dangerous world of the Russian mafiya, family bonds begin to fray with life-altering consequences."

The cast list keeps getting more interesting. Driver plays Gary Pearl, a former cop working as a fixer. Teller plays his younger brother Irwin, an engineer, and Johansson plays Irwin's wife Hester, a woman with turmoil of her own as the family collapses around her. Gavin Goudey and Roman Engel play their sons, and Victor Ptak appears as the intimidating mob boss at the center of the trouble, as detailed in GeekTyrant's trailer breakdown. For Driver and Johansson, the film is a reunion: they previously co-starred in Noah Baumbach's Marriage Story in 2019, for which both received Academy Award nominations. Anyone who watched that film knows how combustible the two of them can be together, and here that chemistry gets dropped into a pressure cooker.

From a Cannes ovation to a November release

The film has already had one big public moment. Paper Tiger premiered in the Main Competition at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, where it joined the lineup as a late addition and earned a 10-minute standing ovation after its first screening, as reported by Deadline. Reviews were divided, but Driver's performance kept getting singled out as one of the film's strengths. Deadline's Pete Hammond called it "superbly crafted by Gray, who knows how to twist a crime-genre tale into something fresh and pulse-pounding," and the film currently holds an 83% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 53 reviews, according to MovieWeb.

For Gray, this is a homecoming of sorts. He has spent most of his career telling stories about families, crime, ambition, and New York, with films like We Own the Night, Two Lovers, Little Odessa, and The Immigrant. His most recent features went elsewhere: the autobiographical Armageddon Time in 2022 and the space epic Ad Astra in 2019. Paper Tiger puts him back on the turf he knows best, working-class New York, criminal pressure, and family loyalty bending under both.

The rollout starts soon. Paper Tiger makes its North American premiere with a gala screening on September 25 at the 64th New York Film Festival. Neon will then open the film in select U.S. theaters on November 13, 2026, before expanding nationwide on November 20. The Paper Tiger trailer also lands in a busy fall for star-driven crime pictures, following the new Cliff Booth trailer that put Brad Pitt back on the case. If the trailer is any indication, expect a slow-burn family drama that turns into a crime picture without ever really announcing the switch. The Pearl brothers made one deal with the wrong people, and the next two hours are about what that costs them.