James Gray directs Paper Tiger crime drama set in Queens

While bbc.com spotlights James Gray’s Queens-set period piece Paper Tiger, yahoo.com widens the lens to encompass a dozen wide-ranging releases including a Quentin Tarantino-scripted comedy-thriller directed by David Fincher.

Paper Tiger Brings Childhood Grime to Queens

James Gray returns to his personal history with Paper Tiger, a gritty 1986-set crime drama in Queens that stars Scarlett Johansson and Miles Teller as a married couple, Hester and Irwin, alongside Adam Driver as Irwin’s charismatic ex-cop brother, Gary. Gary pulls his brother into a scheme to clean up a polluted canal for Russian immigrants, a deal that unravels quickly when they cross paths with ruthless gangsters. “As with his finest work, Gray strikes a beautiful balance between fraught interpersonal drama and nail-biting thrills,” Nick Schager writes in The Daily Beast, as cited by bbc.com, adding that the movie “pulsates with heart, rancour, and terror.”

Dystopian Expansion and Stage Biographies

The slate also reaches back into established intellectual property with The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, a prequel set 40 years after The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and 24 years before Katniss Everdeen’s adventures, per yahoo.com. Opening internationally on November 19 and 20, the cast features Joseph Zada as a younger version of Woody Harrelson’s character and Ralph Fiennes as President Snow. Meanwhile, biographical drama Elsinore tracks Daniel Day-Lewis’s 1989 departure from London’s National Theatre production of Hamlet and his replacement by Ian Charleson. Directed by Simon Stone and written by Stephen Beresford, the film stars Andrew Scott as Charleson, alongside Olivia Colman and Billie Piper, with a US release slated for November 20.