“Paper Tiger” director James Gray will receive the Director Award at this year’s Mill Valley Film Festival, MVFF organizers announced on Wednesday.
The award will be presented on Oct. 5, when a screening of “Paper Tiger” will be followed by an onstage conversation moderated by “Knives Out” director Rian Johnson.
“Paper Tiger” is a family drama starring Miles Teller as a construction worker whose ex-cop brother (Adam Driver) lures him into a potentially lucrative cleanup job that goes wrong and results in Russian mob threats against his family (wife Scarlett Johansson and sons Roman Engel and Gavi Goudey).
TheWrap’s review out of the Cannes Film Festival called “Paper Tiger” “a taut exercise in suspense, with a couple of bravura sequences that stretch the tension to the breaking point as hubris and wishful thinking lead a family into dangers they didn’t know existed – but it’s also a warmhearted study of family members who can argue and be wildly at odds, but who almost always walk away from each other with the parting words, ‘I love you.’”
In addition to “Paper Tiger,” Gray is known for “Little Odessa,” “The Yards,” “We Own the Night,” “Two Lovers,” “The Immigrant,” “The Lost City of Z,” “Ad Astra” and “Armageddon Time.”
In a statement, MVFF artistic director Rose Kuo said, “James Gray has spent more than three decades investigating the myths of the American family and the culture that shapes it. With ‘Paper Tiger,’ he returns to one of the most powerful relationships in his films: the fraught bond between brothers.”
The film, which premiered in Cannes in May, will open the New York Film Festival on Sept. 25 and be released by Neon in the fall.
The 2026 Mill Valley Film Festival will run from Oct. 1 through Oct. 11 in Marin County and the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California.
