How 'Paper Tiger' Became the American Movie Cannes 2026 Was Waiting For

When James Gray walked back onto the Grand Théâtre Lumière stage on the night of May 16, he had two of his three lead actors with him and the third on his phone. Adam Driver and Miles Teller flanked the director. Scarlett Johansson, the third name above the title on Paper Tiger, was in New York shooting Mike Flanagan’s The Exorcist reboot. Gray tried to FaceTime her into the room. The call went to voicemail. The audience kept clapping anyway, for what Deadline and Variety both clocked at roughly 10 minutes, the longest sustained ovation of the festival’s opening week.

The moment landed because of what Paper Tiger represents to a 79th Festival de Cannes that has spent its first week being defined by what isn’t there. No Disney film. No Warner Bros. film. No Netflix premiere. As American Courant reported earlier this month, the major Hollywood studios skipped the in-competition slate for the first time since 2017, leaving the Palme d’Or race to international auteurs and a small handful of American independents. Gray’s film, distributed in North America by NEON, was the one American movie with the kind of star wattage Cannes used to take for granted. It delivered the loudest reception of the early festival.

A James Gray homecoming, on a James Gray budget

Paper Tiger is set in 1986 Queens, the same outer-borough territory Gray has been excavating since his 1994 debut Little Odessa. Teller plays Irwin, a struggling engineer pulled into a toxic-waste cleanup scheme by his charismatic ex-cop brother Gary, played by Driver. The brothers’ deal partners are a Russian mafia operation that doesn’t take kindly to amateurs. Johansson plays Irwin’s wife. The plot is genre material; the film is, according to almost every review filed from Cannes, a family melodrama with a body count.

Time’s Stephanie Zacharek described it as “an old school thriller in the best way” and “quietly operatic in its intensity.” The Hollywood Reporter, IndieWire, Roger Ebert’s site, and The Film Stage all filed positive notices. Owen Gleiberman’s Variety review was more skeptical, calling it “a James Gray film with more atmosphere than plausibility,” and a fault line opened in the World of Reel write-up between critics who loved it and an audience response that ran even hotter. None of those splits dimmed the ovation in the room.

The film was acquired by NEON for North American distribution before the festival, IndieWire reported in April. NEON is the same specialty label that turned Parasite into a best picture winner in 2020 and has built a reputation for nursing auteur films through the fall festival circuit into the Oscar race. Paper Tiger arrives in Cannes with that release apparatus already wired. The film does not yet have an announced U.S. theatrical date.

Why the FaceTime moment mattered more than the FaceTime moment

The image of Gray waving a phone at the audience while Johansson’s voicemail picked up has played as a charming festival anecdote in the trades. Read another way, it is also a fairly direct illustration of the bind a working A-list movie star sits inside in 2026. Johansson was not in the south of France because she was on a New York stage shooting a tentpole horror picture for a competing studio. The same actress can be the lead in a Palme d’Or contender and a contractually committed lead on another shoot at the same moment, and the math of working studio production schedules now wins over the marketing calendar of an awards-season festival.

That is the texture under all of Cannes 2026’s early-week conversation about American absence. The festival is short the Hollywood studios because the studios calculated that a Croisette premiere doesn’t drive their kinds of titles. It is short A-listers like Johansson not because the actors don’t want to come (Gray’s stage call was a literal demonstration of wanting her there) but because the production calendars they sign no longer leave room for a week in May. Gray made the joke from the stage. The joke was about a real shift in how the festival relates to American star power.

Driver, for his part, handled the press week in a register that has become familiar at festival appearances: declining to revisit Girls-era questions during the Paper Tiger press conference, redirecting reporters back to the work. Teller, whose Cannes profile is thinner than his two co-stars’, got the kind of reception from international critics that Gray’s casts often get the second time around. First dismissed, then reappraised.

The competition that matters now

Paper Tiger is one of 22 films in competition for the Palme d’Or, which will be handed out at the closing ceremony on May 23 by a jury led by South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook. The early week was crowded with other major standing ovations. Na Hong-jin’s South Korean creature feature Hope drew its own seven-minute reception on May 17 after a nine-year wait since The Wailing. Jeanne Herry’s Garance and Yoon Sang-ho’s zombie thriller Colony also drew prolonged applause. The festival’s honorary Palmes d’Or have already gone to Peter Jackson (opening night) and, on short notice, to John Travolta. Barbra Streisand will receive the third at the closing ceremony.

What Paper Tiger has that the foreign-language competition titles cannot easily generate is American awards-season infrastructure. NEON’s playbook for a film like this is straightforward. Cannes premiere, fall festival relay through Telluride and Toronto, awards-corridor theatrical release before Thanksgiving, then a precision campaign through the guild votes. The label ran exactly that route with Anora in 2024 and Anatomy of a Fall before it. Gray’s last directorial outing, Armageddon Time in 2022, premiered at Cannes and did not break through with awards voters. Ad Astra in 2019 was a studio production with a different rollout altogether. Paper Tiger is the first Gray film in a decade to land in Cannes with both the critical reaction and the distribution behind it to plausibly travel into the Oscar conversation.

That conversation already has its first reference point of the 2027 cycle: ABC’s recent confirmation that Conan O’Brien will host the Oscars for a third straight year frames the season as a continuity year for the academy, with the campaign cycle compressed and the host pre-committed. A Cannes ovation in May has rarely translated into Oscar gold without significant theatrical traction in the fall, and the films that do convert tend to be the ones with specialty distributors built for it.

The Sunday Guardian and the Indian trade coverage that followed the premiere already attached “Oscar buzz” to the film. Industry analysts at Gold Derby and Awards Daily put it among the early Palme d’Or possibilities, behind the heavier-weighted Korean and French entries on the jury grid but ahead of most other American material in the competition.

What changes now

For NEON, Paper Tiger is the season’s tentpole specialty title, and the Cannes ovation gives the label what it needed coming out of the premiere weekend: a single quotable headline number (10 minutes) and a critical split deep enough to keep the discussion alive for months. For Driver and Teller, both of whom have had bumpy stretches with critics in recent studio releases, the film resets the conversation. For Johansson, the festival absence is already being framed not as a snub but as a working actress’s scheduling reality, a useful piece of context for her own awards campaign next winter.

That kind of stage management is exactly the muscle the major studios used to flex on the Croisette. The summer slate they are running at home, anchored last week by Disney’s box-office surprise The Devil Wears Prada 2 outgrossing its 2006 original in ten days, suggests the studios still know how to assemble a moment when they want to. They have just decided, for now, that Cannes is not where they want to assemble it.

For Cannes itself, the night is being read as evidence that the festival’s “American problem” is, more precisely, an American-studio problem. When American filmmakers come, with American stars, in films that prestige distributors believe can win, the room still responds the way it always has. The 10-minute ovation was for the movie. It was also, by implication, for the version of the festival that hasn’t gone away, even in a year when the marquee logos in the Palais lobby say Universal Korea and Park Chan-wook and Park Films, and not Disney or Warners.

The jury votes through the closing weekend. Gray will know whether his second decade of returning to Cannes has finally produced a prize on the night of May 23.