• Scarlett Johansson missed the Cannes premiere of Paper Tiger because she’s currently filming the Exorcist reboot for Universal
• Director James Gray tried to FaceTime her during the standing ovation — she didn’t pick up
• Gray read a heartfelt letter from Johansson aloud at the next day’s press conference
• The film earned a standing ovation of somewhere between six and ten minutes at the Grand Théâtre Lumière
• Critics are calling it Gray’s best film yet, with Adam Driver drawing career-best notices

James Gray’s Paper Tiger arrived at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival to one of the most rapturous receptions of the year — a roaring standing ovation, a crowd that included Cate Blanchett, Julianne Moore, and Demi Moore, and the kind of critical heat that makes awards season conversations start in May. The only thing missing was one of its stars.

Scarlett Johansson was not in the South of France on Saturday night. She’s currently on set filming the Exorcist reboot for Universal, directed by Mike Flanagan — billed as an entirely new story, not connected to the existing franchise — and her schedule simply couldn’t be moved. Adam Driver and Miles Teller flanked Gray on the red carpet, and the crowd showed up for all of them. But Johansson’s absence was felt.

Gray, visibly moved by the response, actually pulled out his phone during the ovation and tried to FaceTime her so she could hear it. She didn’t pick up.

The next morning, at the film’s press conference, he made sure she was there in spirit. Gray read a letter Johansson had written — one that didn’t explain her absence but didn’t need to. What it did instead was something rarer.

Johansson’s Letter to Gray

“Working with James and this extraordinary cast was one of the great pleasures of my career,” she wrote. “I feel so fortunate to have been part of a story so deeply rooted in what matters most: human connection, identity and the way our values evolve across generations.”

Then, addressing Gray directly — who was standing there reading it aloud — she got personal: “James, I know you are reading this right now and this part will make you genuinely queasy. My apologies. But I want you to know how much it means to me to have been part of something that you created with such care and intention that came from the depths of your artistic soul.”

She closed with something that felt less like a standard press quote and more like a genuine statement of belief: “Cinema has this rare and remarkable power to connect us to one another through a shared experience. It happens in the dark, where we can’t see each other’s faces, and yet somehow we can feel each other’s presence, each other’s empathy. That collective empathy is something we could certainly use more of right now.”

Gray, for his part, had said something similar the night before. Standing in front of the cheering Grand Théâtre Lumière crowd, visibly overwhelmed, he told the audience: “Without you there is no cinema. Cinema needs you, and cinema needs you guys more than ever. Really, this is a very important time, and Cannes is so important for that reason.”

What the Film Is About

Paper Tiger is set in 1986 Queens, and it follows two brothers — Gary (Driver), a slick ex-NYPD detective turned security entrepreneur, and Irwin (Teller), a straight-laced engineer living quietly with his wife Hester (Johansson) and their two teenage sons. When Gary convinces Irwin to consult on a lucrative Gowanus Canal cleanup project backed by Russian businessmen, neither of them fully grasps what they’re walking into. By the time they do, the mob has their home address, their family is being terrorized, and there’s no clean way out.

What the film layers on top of that crime thriller engine is something much more devastating: Hester, in the middle of all of it, receives a terminal diagnosis and keeps it from everyone, quietly trying to find a way to protect her family from the outside while unraveling from within.

The film was originally conceived as a companion piece to Gray’s 2022 Cannes entry Armageddon Time — Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong were initially attached to play the parents — but scheduling conflicts led to recasting, and Gray took the material in a darker, more heightened direction. Johansson and Teller now play the roles loosely based on Gray’s own parents, and by all accounts the shift worked out better than anyone could have anticipated.

The Reviews Are Extraordinary

Critics have been nearly unanimous in calling this Gray’s finest work. The Hollywood Reporter called it “arguably the director’s best film,” saying the cast is “in blazing form and full command here in a bruising movie that reveals the heavy price of pursuing the American Dream too recklessly.” IndieWire went further, declaring that “Adam Driver gives a career-best performance” in what it called “a devastating tragedy” — “like all of James Gray’s best films, Paper Tiger is both sweepingly mythic and hauntingly personal all at once.”

Time magazine put it this way: “Some thrillers are enjoyable enough, and suspenseful enough, while you’re watching them, and vaporize the instant the credits roll. But there’s another, much rarer kind of thriller: one that follows you home, giving you the feeling you’re being shadowed by a thief, someone or something who stirs in you a fear of loss that wasn’t there before. Paper Tiger is that second kind.”

The Guardian gave it four stars and called it a “heavyweight saga.” The Telegraph, also four stars, singled out Johansson as “terrific in this grubbily engrossing crime thriller.” Deadline’s review highlighted a chase sequence through a wheat field — Gary evading mob pursuers, shot both from within and above the towering stalks — as reminiscent of the crop duster scene in North by Northwest, calling it “the single finest scene Gray has ever staged.”

Not everyone was fully on board. Variety called it a film “engineered to be seen as powerful,” with “more atmosphere than plausibility,” and suggested Gray remains “an ace director who’s still being undercut by the holes in his screenplays.” Next Best Picture found it a lesser entry in his filmography overall, even while acknowledging “flashes throughout of the filmmaker at his absolute best.”

But those dissenting voices are a small minority in what has been an overwhelmingly enthusiastic critical response. Neon — which has won the Palme d’Or six years running — holds U.S. distribution rights, and the awards conversation has already started.

Gray has premiered six films at Cannes — The Yards, We Own the Night, Two Lovers, The Immigrant, Armageddon Time, and now this — and has never taken home a prize. Given what critics are saying, and given the reception in that theater on Saturday night, that streak may finally be about to end.

Johansson, meanwhile, also had another reason to be proud this week at Cannes: her directorial debut, Eleanor the Great, world premiered at the festival. She just couldn’t be in two places — or three — at once.

The post Scarlett Johansson Misses ‘Paper Tiger’ Cannes Premiere appeared first on Cream.

• Scarlett Johansson missed the Cannes premiere of Paper Tiger because she’s currently filming the Exorcist reboot directed by Mike Flanagan.
• Director James Gray tried to FaceTime her during the film’s standing ovation — she didn’t pick up.
• Gray read a heartfelt letter from Johansson at the press conference the following day.
• Critics are calling the film Gray’s best work, with Adam Driver earning particular praise for a career-best performance.
• Paper Tiger has been acquired by Neon for North American distribution.

James Gray had his phone out and everything. As Paper Tiger held the Grand Théâtre Lumière in a standing ovation Saturday night at the Cannes Film Festival — a roar that lasted somewhere between seven and ten minutes depending on who you ask — Gray reportedly tried to FaceTime Scarlett Johansson so she could be part of the moment. She didn’t pick up.

It was the kind of detail that perfectly captured the bittersweet reality of the evening: a crime drama earning one of the festival’s most enthusiastic receptions in years, with one of its three stars thousands of miles away on another set entirely. Johansson is currently filming Universal’s Exorcist reboot directed by Mike Flanagan, an all-new story unconnected to the original franchise, and her scheduling had already required some careful navigation when she signed on late last year.

Co-stars Adam Driver and Miles Teller were both on the Croisette to soak up the love. Johansson was not — and her absence was felt.

The Letter That Made Gray Queasy (By Design)

At the press conference the next day, Gray addressed the empty chair by reading a letter Johansson had sent. She didn’t explain why she couldn’t be there, but she apologized, and she did something else: she called her shot on exactly how Gray would react.

“Working with James and this extraordinary cast was one of the great pleasures of my career,” she wrote. “I feel so fortunate to have been part of a story so deeply rooted in what matters most: human connection, identity and the way our values evolve across generations. I’m sorry I can’t be there with you today. James, I know you are reading this right now and this part will make you genuinely queasy. My apologies.”

She continued: “But I want you to know how much it means to me to have been part of something that you created with such care and intention that came from the depths of your artistic soul. The consideration and sensitivity towards the human condition in this film is so evident on screen, every frame of it, and I am so extraordinarily proud to have been part of it.”

She closed with something that felt less like a press release and more like a genuine belief: “Cinema has this rare and remarkable power to connect us to one another through a shared experience. It happens in the dark, where we can’t see each other’s faces, and yet somehow we can feel each other’s presence, each other’s empathy. That collective empathy is something we could certainly use more of right now.”

Gray, for his part, had already telegraphed just how much this collaboration meant to him. “Scarlett’s last day on set was just about one of the hardest days I’ve had — I was so sad,” he told The Hollywood Reporter ahead of the premiere. “It took me a long time to get over it. Maybe that’s too corny, I don’t know. But it is true.”

The Film Gray Was Always Meant to Make

Paper Tiger is Gray’s sixth film to premiere in competition at Cannes — following The Yards, We Own the Night, Two Lovers, The Immigrant, and Armageddon Time — and the one critics are already saying might finally win him the Palme d’Or he’s never taken home.

Set in 1986 Queens, the film is a noirish crime drama that Gray originally conceived as a companion piece to Armageddon Time, his 2022 semi-autobiographical drama. It opens with an Aeschylus quote — “Let there be wealth without tears; enough for the wise man who will ask no further” — and then proceeds to show you exactly what happens to the people who don’t heed that warning.

Driver plays Gary Pearl, a smooth-talking ex-cop who draws his more cautious brother Irwin (Teller) into a business deal with the Russian mob involving the toxic Gowanus Canal. Johansson plays Hester, Irwin’s wife and the quiet emotional center of the story — a Queens mom privately receiving devastating medical news while her family’s world unravels around her.

The casting wasn’t originally this trio. Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong, who played a version of Gray’s parents in Armageddon Time, were initially set to reprise those roles. When scheduling conflicts pulled both out, Gray reimagined the project — leaning into something more heightened, more melodramatic in the classical sense, and ultimately more personal.

Gray had wanted to work with Johansson for years and assumed she had no interest. “I’ve been kind of obsessed with working with Scarlett for a long time so I had total pessimism about it,” he admitted. Johansson, who was listening in on the same Zoom call when he said this, barely suppressed a smirk before firing back: “I won’t comment on the pessimism part…but James and I have met before to discuss different things, so he’s actually not being totally forthcoming. He did know that I was interested.”

What sealed it was the script. “I was like, ‘Oh, I know I can do this. I don’t necessarily know how I’m going to do it, but I know that there’s something here that I can do and that I can be additive,'” she said. “It had so many elements that I loved. It’s a big story inside of a small story.”

Who Hester Pearl Really Is

Johansson dug deep into the character in ways that were clearly personal. “I liked the idea of Hester being feminine and soft and graceful because she has a lot of chutzpah inside her,” she said. “She loves fashion magazines and going to the movies — she loves romantic comedies and all things romantic — and window shopping. All of those things are such an important part of who she is and how she presents herself. She should be in the middle of her life and striving for more — vivacious and full of life. That’s how I envisioned her.”

The Queens accent and the curls and the big emotional swings came naturally — maybe too naturally, at times. Gray would occasionally pump the brakes. “James would sometimes say to me, ‘It’s too much: You’re not a yenta from Brownsville!'” Johansson recalled with a laugh. Gray defended her: “Scarlett would never do something that wasn’t real. You have to be careful because it can be totally real, but it will fall outside the realm of the language of the movie.”

The role hit a nerve for Johansson beyond just the accent and the period details. “Women give up their dream for their husband and take a step back, and the dream becomes more of a dream for their family. It’s so common. I’ve seen it in my friends, I’ve seen it in my family,” she said. “I just know in my bones what that is — there’s a sadness about it and a beauty about it. It’s such a bittersweet thing.”

What the Critics Are Saying

The notices have been largely strong, with some calling it outright the best film of Gray’s career. The Hollywood Reporter declared it “arguably the director’s best film,” writing that “Gray and his superb cast are in blazing form and full command here in a bruising movie that reveals the heavy price of pursuing the American Dream too recklessly.” Deadline called it “riveting,” singling out a chase sequence through a wheat field as “the single finest scene Gray has ever staged” — one that drew comparisons to the crop duster sequence in North by Northwest.

Indiewire went furthest on Driver, calling his performance “career-best” and the film itself “a devastating tragedy” that is “both sweepingly mythic and hauntingly personal all at once.” The Guardian gave it four stars, calling it a “heavyweight saga,” while the Telegraph also awarded four stars and specifically praised Johansson as “terrific in this grubbily engrossing crime thriller.”

Time magazine put it simply: “Some thrillers are enjoyable enough, and suspenseful enough, while you’re watching them, and vaporize the instant the credits roll. But there’s another, much rarer kind of thriller: one that follows you home… Paper Tiger is that second kind.”

Not everyone was fully converted. Variety called the film more atmospheric than plausible and suggested Gray is “an ace director who’s still being undercut by the holes in his screenplays.” Next Best Picture found it uneven, saying there are “flashes throughout of the filmmaker at his absolute best” but that the whole doesn’t quite match the parts.

Neon — which has won the Palme d’Or for the past six consecutive years — holds North American distribution rights. The film runs just under two hours.

Johansson also has another Cannes credit this year: her directorial debut Eleanor the Great world premiered at the 2025 festival. Between that, Paper Tiger, and the Flanagan Exorcist reboot in production, she is having a remarkable stretch — even if she couldn’t be there to take her bow for this one.

Gray’s letter reading at the press conference said everything, really. She knew it would make him queasy. She did it anyway. That’s the kind of trust you build when you make something that comes from, as she put it, “the depths of your artistic soul.”

The post Scarlett Johansson Misses Paper Tiger Cannes Premiere appeared first on Cream.

• James Gray’s Paper Tiger premiered at Cannes to a standing ovation lasting several minutes at the Grand Théâtre Lumière
• Gray tried to FaceTime Scarlett Johansson during the applause, but she didn’t pick up — she’s currently filming the Exorcist reboot
• Adam Driver and Miles Teller walked the red carpet; Cate Blanchett, Julianne Moore, and Pawel Pawlikowski were spotted applauding in the audience
• NEON, which has won the Palme d’Or six years running, has already secured North American distribution rights
• Paper Tiger marks Gray’s sixth film to premiere at Cannes — and he still hasn’t taken home a prize

James Gray has always had a thing with Cannes. Saturday night, Cannes had a thing right back.

Gray’s Paper Tiger — his first film since 2022’s Armageddon Time — debuted to a thunderous standing ovation at the Grand Théâtre Lumière, with audiences on their feet for somewhere between six and ten minutes depending on who you ask. (Festival ovation timing is an inexact science, and everyone’s stopwatch tells a slightly different story.) What’s not up for debate: the room was electric, and Gray, standing at the front of it, looked genuinely overwhelmed.

“I have to say, as you probably can tell, looking at my face, I’m more comfortable behind the camera than in front of it,” he told the crowd. Then, visibly moved, he got to the heart of it: “Without you there is no cinema. Cinema needs you, and cinema needs you guys more than ever. Really, this is a very important time, and Cannes is so important for that reason, and you are so important for that reason. So it always moves me greatly to see you here in this theater where I have very many memories.”

He wasn’t wrong about the memories. Paper Tiger is his sixth film to premiere on the Croisette, following Armageddon Time, The Immigrant, Two Lovers, We Own the Night, and The Yards — a run that stretches back to 2000. He also served on the competition jury in 2019. The man is practically a fixture of the festival at this point, even if a Palme d’Or has continued to elude him.

Brothers, the Mob, and 1980s Queens

Paper Tiger is a gritty crime drama set in 1980s Queens, following Hester and Irwin — played by Scarlett Johansson and Miles Teller — a couple raising a family when Irwin’s flashy brother (Adam Driver) pulls him into a moneymaking scheme that goes catastrophically wrong. What starts as opportunity quickly becomes something darker: the family finds themselves terrorized by the Russian mob, their bond fraying under the pressure, betrayal creeping in where it once seemed impossible.

Gray, speaking to The Hollywood Reporter ahead of the premiere, was clear-eyed about what he was going for. “To be very pretentious about it, the intention was to try to make a very classical drama,” he said. “People sometimes shit on that idea, ‘classical’ — they equate it with ‘old-fashioned,’ but the two are not the same thing. Internal conflict, struggle, love, emotion — that is never old-fashioned.”

Johansson, for her part, was drawn to the scope of it. “It had so many elements that I loved,” she told THR. “It’s a big story inside of a small story.” Of her character Hester — a stay-at-home mom with quiet ferocity beneath the surface — she said, “I liked the idea of Hester being feminine and soft and graceful because she has a lot of chutzpah inside her.”

The FaceTime That Went Unanswered

Johansson wasn’t in Cannes on Saturday night. She’s currently in production on Universal’s Exorcist prequel, which kept her from making the trip to the South of France. Driver and Teller were there, walking the red carpet alongside Gray and soaking up the crowd’s enthusiasm — big waves of cheers rolled in for both of them.

But Gray wasn’t ready to let Johansson miss the moment entirely. Mid-standing ovation, he pulled out his phone and tried to FaceTime her so she could hear the room. She didn’t pick up.

It’s the kind of detail that writes itself. A director at the peak of a career-defining night, the Grand Théâtre Lumière roaring around him, staring at a ringing phone. Gray, ever the showman, also jokingly pointed to his watch during the applause — a playful nudge for the audience to keep going a little longer. They obliged.

Cate Blanchett, Julianne Moore, and director Pawel Pawlikowski were among those on their feet in the audience after the screening.

NEON’s Winning Streak Continues

Paper Tiger was actually a late addition to the official competition lineup. When Cannes artistic director Thierry Frémaux announced the initial slate in early April, he was openly still pursuing the film. “It’s the James Gray who has never stopped being himself,” Frémaux told Variety at the time, acknowledging the project was “complicated to put together” with “still some contractual issues to resolve.” By the end of April, it was in.

NEON moved quickly on North American distribution rights — not surprising, given the company has won the Palme d’Or for six consecutive years. The film was literally announced at last year’s Cannes market, and its trajectory from there to competition slot to distribution deal has been remarkably fast.

Gray’s last Cannes premiere, Armageddon Time in 2022, drew a five-minute standing ovation and a tearful speech from the director. This one felt bigger — louder, longer, more charged. Whether the jury agrees when it comes time to hand out prizes is another question entirely. But on Saturday night in that theater, with the crowd still on its feet and his star unreachable on FaceTime, James Gray looked like a man who knew he’d made something worth the noise.

The post Paper Tiger Earns Standing Ovation at Cannes Premiere appeared first on Cream.

• James Gray’s Paper Tiger premiered in competition at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival on May 16
• Adam Driver, Miles Teller, and Scarlett Johansson star as a Queens family entangled with the Russian mob in 1986
• Driver is earning early awards buzz with critics calling it a career-best performance
• The film is a spiritual companion to Gray’s 2022 Armageddon Time, again rooted in the director’s own childhood
• NEON will release Paper Tiger in theaters later this year

James Gray brought Paper Tiger to the Grand Théâtre Lumière at Cannes on Saturday night, and if the reaction from critics is any indication, he may have finally made the film that earns him the Palme d’Or that has eluded him across six competition appearances at the festival. Adam Driver, Miles Teller, and Scarlett Johansson walked the red carpet alongside Gray — with Demi Moore, Cate Blanchett, Chloé Zhao, and Ruth Negga among the guests who turned out for the gala — and what they unveiled is a bruising, operatically intense crime drama that has already ignited one of the more spirited critical conversations of this year’s festival.

Set in 1986 Queens, Paper Tiger opens on Irwin Pearl (Teller), a mild-mannered reservoir engineer living a modest but decent life with his wife Hester (Johansson) and their two teenage sons, Scott (Gavin Goudey) and Ben (Roman Engel). The family is tight-knit, a little cash-strapped, and quietly anxious about the future — particularly whether Scott can realistically aim for an Ivy League school. Then Uncle Gary (Driver) shows up at the door with caterers from Peter Luger Steak House in tow, his ankle holster visible, his blue Mercedes parked out front, and a business proposition that sounds, at first, almost reasonable.

Gary, a divorced ex-cop who still has deep connections inside the NYPD, has gotten wind of a lucrative opportunity tied to the long-overdue cleanup of the Gowanus Canal — the notoriously polluted 1.8-mile stretch of Brooklyn waterway. He needs his brother’s engineering expertise to make the deal work. What he neglects to mention is that the other partners in this venture are the Russian mob.

The Brothers Pearl

The film’s emotional core is the relationship between these two brothers, and Gray — who has spent his career excavating fraternal strain in films like Little Odessa and The Yards — has never pulled at those ties more forcefully. Irwin isn’t blind to Gary’s flaws, exactly. He just can’t resist him. Teller plays the character with the wizened humility of a man who knows it would be gauche to forsake what his family sacrificed to make possible, while still feeling the quiet, corrosive sting of watching his flashier brother glide through a world that seems to have no place for a decent, hardworking engineer.

Driver, meanwhile, is earning the kind of reviews actors frame and hang on walls. His Gary is a vintage ’80s showboat who only knows how to show affection by offering to share in his apparent success — a calculated charmer whose bravado masks something more complicated and more desperate underneath. The tragedy of Paper Tiger, as several critics have noted, isn’t simply that getting mixed up with the mob tears these brothers apart. It’s that the danger pulls them closer together than they’ve been in years, forcing into the open an extraordinary bond that also happens to be the reason everything went so wrong in the first place.

“We’ve never played in the dirt,” Gary tells Irwin at one point, lying through his teeth about the Gowanus deal being above board. But they’re playing together now.

The Russians themselves — led by the thuggish Alexei (Yavor Vesselinov) and the genuinely terrifying mob boss Semion Bogoyavich (Victor Ptak) — are rendered without much ambiguity, which is somewhat by design. Gray plays up their ruthlessness to underscore just how far out of his depth Irwin truly is. The film’s most harrowing early sequence arrives when Irwin, in a moment of well-meaning naivety, drives his sons out to Brooklyn one school night to show them what their dad has gotten into — and witnesses the Russians illegally dumping waste into the canal. What follows is a stomach-churning confrontation: Irwin gets punched in the face in an office while a mobster climbs into the car with his boys and produces a stiletto. It’s the kind of scene that works precisely because it arrives so early, before the audience has had time to brace for it.

The logical response, of course, would be to walk away immediately. The fact that Irwin doesn’t — that he continues forward even after a knife has been held to his son’s face — is where some critics have found the film’s plausibility strained. The Russians subsequently inform the brothers that, due to Irwin’s “transgression,” they now owe $150,000. Gary’s reassurance that these men are a “paper tiger” — less dangerous than they appear — lands as either a profound act of self-deception or a reckless lie, and the film is more interested in the human cost of that choice than in making Gary’s psychology entirely legible.

Johansson’s Quiet Devastation

While the brothers spiral, Hester is quietly managing her own crisis. She’s been experiencing mental lapses and throbbing headaches, and the news she eventually receives from her doctor — that she may have as little as a year to live — she keeps entirely to herself, unwilling to add to the weight already crushing her family. It’s a performance Johansson has rarely matched: tough-edged and Queens-accented on the surface, but growing more hollowed out and heartsick with every scene. The moment she finally learns what Irwin and Gary have been hiding from her — the full scope of the danger her sons were put in — is, by most accounts, one of the film’s most shattering. Her rage and terror arriving simultaneously, without anywhere to go.

The film also features a standout set piece that’s already being described as among the finest sequences Gray has ever staged: a chase through a tall, deserted wheatfield as Gary tries to lose the Russians tailing him, shot both from within the maze of grass and from above, with a visual energy that recalls the crop-duster sequence in North by Northwest</em. Cinematographer Joaquin Baca-Asay — who shot We Own the Night and Two Lovers for Gray — works in 35mm, and the period textures of late-’80s New York are rendered with the kind of gritty specificity that makes the world feel genuinely inhabited rather than dressed. Christopher Spelman’s score, blending ominous orchestral swells with lugubrious Russian choral music, does the rest.