Adam Driver leads an impressive cast in this masterfully tense ’80s-set mob drama
Paper Tiger
Starring Adam Driver, Miles Teller & Scarlett Johansson
Directed by James Gray
Rated R
In limited release Friday, Nov. 13, 2026, wider release Nov. 20
Movies about “organized crime” and gangsters have been around for more than a century, a long line connecting Edward G. Robinson’s Little Caesar to Marlon Brando’s Godfather, Robert De Niro’s Goodfellas and, most recently, John Travolta as John Gotti.
Paper Tiger is a movie about the Russian mob—and more specifically, about a family that runs afoul of Soviet mobsters taking up shop in New York City in the 1980s. Miles Teller plays Irwin, an engineer with two teenage sons; Scarlett Johansson is his wife, Hester; and Adam Driver is Gary, Irwin’s older brother, a New York cop who enlists Irwin for a project to help out some, ahem, businessmen involved with development of an industrial area and cleanup of a polluted canal.
And yes, those shady businessmen are Russians, part of a bigger network of shady businessmen, a much murkier mass of organized crime. Gary and Irwin’s business deal—their ill-advised attempt to apply a legitimate solution for an illegitimate operation, and profit from it with mob money—soon escalates into something more intimidating and life-altering, threatening Irwin’s family.
Director James Gray—whose resume includes several other crime dramas, including Little Odessa, We Own the Night and Blood Ties—knows how to ratchet up the tension, and he makes the movie “feel” like the ‘80s, from clothing, hairstyles and dialogue to little details, like a battered pay phone on a desolate-looking brick wall, covered in graffiti. There’s a lot of darkness and dim light, from scenes that happen at night, in basements and murky, smoke-filled rooms, on cloudy days that block out the sunshine, and inside a house ransacked by intruders while a family sleeps. It’s an effectively appropriate feel of shadows and shadiness from another era.
The cast is all top-notch, with a pile of awards, nominations and box-office mojo to back them up. Driver, especially, drives the story, as a flashy divorcee and wheeler-dealer (he drives a Mercedes, and charms with his fancy piano playing) working both sides of the law. Teller, who played an up-and-coming drummer in the excellent Whiplash, taps into another kind of downbeat rhythm as a husband and father finding himself in a dilemma with no clear way out. And Johansson, one of the most successful stars of the modern era, settles into a new groove as a suburban housewife and mom, simmering with resentment about the dire circumstance she’s in.
The movie takes its title from a phrase used to describe something, or someone, that appears intimidating but really isn’t much of a threat, like how Paul doesn’t seem too worried about the Russian mob, a gaggle of menacing goodfellas with names like Bogoyavich and Yunov. “They huff and puff” like paper tigers, he tells his brother, assuring him that he’s got everything under control.
Until he doesn’t.
Paper Tiger is a first-class, slow-burn thriller about organized crime from the perspective of mob outsiders who’ve stepped barely inside the criminal world, seen things they weren’t meant to see, and now feel the slow, sure squeeze of its vice-like grip. There are a couple of twists and turns as the plot thickens, but—as in The Godfather—it all comes down to family, as Irwin, his brother, his wife and their sons desperately seek to find a way out of their mobster mess, while dealing with more “mundane” everyday issues like an upcoming graduation party or Hester’s alarming onset of a serious medical condition.
It mostly keeps the mobsters in the background, an ever-present threat looming and lurking in the shadows. There’s no real “action” until the movie’s closing moments, played out in a somberly poetic scene in a thicket of marsh grass alongside a lonely stretch of highway—a scene that almost feels like an homage to another mobster movie, and how Joe Pesci’s Casino character, Nicky Santoto, met his end in a cornfield.
This Paper Tiger purrs, growls and ultimately pounces, sinking in its teeth and leaving its mark as a worthy new entry into the mob-movie must-see canon.
—Neil Pond