Adam Driver, Anne Hathaway And Jeremy Strong To Lead James Gray Crime Thriller Paper Tiger

Ever since his Venice Silver Lion winning first movie Little Odessa way back in 1995, James Gray has time and again proved himself one of America’s most introspective, thoughtful filmmakers. From the railroad drama of The Yards, to inner and outer Odyssean epic The Lost City Of Z, to space bound father-son fictive Ad Astra, Gray’s movies are always worth paying close attention to. Now, having made perhaps his most personal film yet in the shape of 2022’s Armageddon Time, the auteur is reuniting with his leads from that picture and welcoming a recent face into the Gray fray for his latest. Per Deadline‘s reporting, Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong are set to star alongside Adam Driver in Paper Tiger, an original crime thriller directed and penned by Gray himself.

According to Deadline, the movie — which is headed for the American Film Market next week — follows two brothers (presumably but not confirmed to be Strong and Driver) whose pursuit of the American Dream is jeopardised when they get involved in a scheme that sounds, and turns out to be, too good to be true. “As they try to navigate their way through an ever-more dangerous world of corruption and violence, they find themselves and their family brutally terrorized by the Russian “Mafiya,” reads the shared description. “Their bond begins to fray, and betrayal — once utterly unthinkable — now becomes all too possible.”

Whilst we can make an educated guess as to the nature of Driver and Strong’s roles, there’s no word as of yet on how Hathaway factors into the narrative; in Gray’s semi-autobiographical Armageddon Time, Strong and Hathaway played Esther and Irving Graff, ostensibly the filmmaker’s own mother and father. But with filming expected to get underway on this one early next year, we’ll hopefully see how Strong, Driver, and Hathaway fit into the Paper Tiger fold fairly soon. (And yes, yes that was an origami joke.)