The Locarno Film Festival announced it will present Gray with the Pardo alla Carriera on August 9, ahead of an open-air screening of his new crime drama “Paper Tiger” on the festival’s 8,000-seat Piazza Grande. Two earlier films, “We Own the Night” and “Two Lovers,” round out a mini-retrospective during the festival’s 79th edition, running August 5 to 15. The trip marks Gray’s first appearance at Locarno, a notable gap for a director who has built his career on the European festival circuit since winning the Silver Lion at Venice for “Little Odessa” in 1994, when he was 25.
Artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro called Gray “the last great novelist of American cinema,” pointing to a body of work shaped by the Jewish diaspora, film noir and Russian literary tradition. Gray has spent three decades documenting immigrant striving and criminal entanglement in New York, from “The Yards” and “The Immigrant” through detours into science fiction with “Ad Astra” and colonial adventure with “The Lost City of Z.” His 2022 semi-autobiographical drama “Armageddon Time” pushed that personal material furthest, and “Paper Tiger” extends it again, casting Scarlett Johansson and Miles Teller as stand-ins for Gray’s own parents in a 1986 Queens story about two brothers, played by Teller and Adam Driver, drawn into a scheme with the Russian mob.
Reaction out of Cannes, where “Paper Tiger” competed for the Palme d’Or in May, has been sharply divided. Several critics praised the film as Gray operating at peak intensity, with one review calling it his most gratifying work in years. Others found the screenplay thin and the casting of Johansson and Teller as aging parents unconvincing, arguing the film settles for atmosphere over substance. Driver’s performance has drawn consistent praise regardless of a reviewer’s overall verdict.
Locarno’s career award has previously gone to Bruno Ganz, Claudia Cardinale, Costa-Gavras and, last year, Jackie Chan. “Paper Tiger” opens the New York Film Festival in the fall, distributed by Neon.
