Among his contemporaries, James Gray is the American director who most delicately captures the American landscape and its emotional textures. Like his previous film, Armageddon Time (2022), his latest work draws on autobiographical material, but while the former took the form of a drama, Paper Tiger leans closer to noir. Is Gray seeking to explore the two faces of family? In 1980s New York, electrical engineer Irwin becomes entangled with the Russian mafia after joining a river cleanup project proposed by his brother Gary, a former police officer. The film portrays ordinary relationships and ordinary desires in utterly ordinary terms yet shapes them through words and gestures of extraordinary elegance, carrying forward the great tradition of American cinema. Watching the fractured play of light and shadow, the intersecting trajectories and inner lives of its characters, and above all the ensemble performances of Miles Teller, Adam Driver, and Scarlett Johansson – who move between restraint and eruption – one comes to realize that noir is, above all, a beautiful lyrical poem. (GOO Hyeong Jun)