NEW YORK — The 64th New York Film Festival opens Friday at Lincoln Center with the North American premiere of James Gray's "Paper Tiger," a Queens-set crime drama starring Adam Driver, Miles Teller and Scarlett Johansson that marks the director's fourth film to screen at the festival. The gala opening-night screening takes place at Alice Tully Hall on Sept. 25, kicking off a run that continues through Oct. 12 across venues operated by Film at Lincoln Center.
"Paper Tiger," which premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, is set in 1986 and follows Irwin (Teller), an engineer with modest middle-class ambitions, after his brother Gary (Driver), a former NYPD officer, pulls him into a scheme to help Russian mob figures dump oil near the Gowanus Canal. The fallout threatens Irwin's wife, Hester (Johansson), and their children. Gray has said the story draws loosely on his own family's brush with organized crime in 1980s New York. Neon has scheduled a theatrical release for Nov. 13.
Festival artistic director Dennis Lim called the film a high point in Gray's career, saying it confirms the director as one of the defining filmmakers working today.
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.
Dennis Lim, Artistic Director, New York Film Festival
A slate from 31 countries
The film joins a 32-title main slate drawn from 31 countries. The festival's centerpiece selection is Tony Gilroy's "Behemoth!," and its closing-night slot goes to Ava DuVernay's documentary "14th." The lineup also includes two prizewinners from this year's Cannes Film Festival, Andrey Zvyagintsev's Grand Prix winner "Minotaur" and Paweł Pawlikowski's "Fatherland," alongside new work from Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, Pedro Almodóvar, Andrew Haigh, Mike Leigh, Radu Jude, Lee Chang-dong and Chris Rock, whose "Misty Green" is among the more unexpected inclusions on a slate otherwise dominated by festival-circuit veterans.
Now in its seventh decade, the New York Film Festival remains one of the few major North American showcases that does not hand out competitive prizes, positioning itself instead as a curated survey of the year's most significant festival premieres rather than a launchpad for awards-season campaigning. Tickets for individual screenings are on sale now through Film at Lincoln Center, with the festival's public program running alongside industry screenings and talks through the two-and-a-half-week run.