PAPER TIGER***** - BFI London Film Festival 2026 - Day 5

Writer-director James Gray’s PAPER TIGER is a handsomely-made, well-considered and strangely old-fashioned character drama set in early 80s New York. TOP GUN: MAVERICK’s Miles Teller and Scarlett Johansson star as husband and wife Irwin and Hester, raising two teenage boys in a family home in Queens. They both work and are doing well enough but are acutely aware that they’re about to have to pay college tuition. 

At the start of the film, Irwin’s charismatic larger-than-life brother Gary (Adam Driver) arrives armed with a van of Peter Luger steaks and wearing a flashy suit and watch. He’s clearly done well with his security business since leaving the police, but he envies Irwin’s loving home life. His big idea is that they should go into business together advising the new Russian migrants taking over the docks on environmental matters. Of course, the new Russians turn out to be incredibly dangerous and Irwin’s family is at risk. But this raises the question of who really is family. Should Irwin care about Gary as much as he cares about Hester and the kids? And what will Hester do knowing her kids are at risk? 

What I love about this film is how I never really knew which way Gary would go right up until the final scene. I believed in the family dynamics completely. And all three leads give characteristically strong, layered performances. The film works as a play about institutionalised corruption and what happens to the small guy caught in its vice. It’s never obvious and always allows its plot moves to feel organic.  

But what elevates PAPER TIGER beyond another worthy drama is the visual and audio style of James Gray. Every scene, every frame, every audio cue is intentional and considered. It’s carefully constructed and you feel the emotional and psychological insight and weight that comes with that. The result is a grown-up film for grown-ups. One that rewards patient and careful viewing. 

PAPER TIGER is rated R and has a running time of 1hr 55m. It opens in the UK on November 13th.

A COMPLETE UNKNOWN**

A COMPLETE UNKNOWN is a deeply frustrating biopic of Bob Dylan.  Rather than challenging his misogynistic bullshit, the film replicates it.  Director James Mangold (WALK THE LINE) is not interested in interrogating the complexity of Saint Bob. Rather, everything must be packaged neatly in a convenient narrative arc.

That arc is massaged to within an inch of its life. Young Bob - choirboy turned gravelly voiced folk-singer - makes a pilgrimage to New York to meet his chronically ill hero Woody Guthrie.  Scoot McNairy (IN SEARCH OF A MIDNIGHT KISS) stuns in an entirely wordless performance as Guthrie, struck mute with Hungtington's Disease, but still keen to be surrounded by music. Such is Bob's evident talent that he is taken in by a kindly, paternal Pete Seeger (Ed Norton) and his wife Toshi, a couple whose life was devoted to preserving the American folk music tradition.

Bob finds fame and massive music sales with his protest songs against a backdrop of the civil rights movement.  But this is the era of the Beatles and The Stones and The Kinks and he feels trapped in amber by the historicity of the folk movement.  He hires a blues rock band and records what will be his first electric rock album, Highway 61 Revisited.  

The narrative arc poses a big showdown at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Will Bob play nice and play folk? Or will he disappoint everyone around him and play electric rock?  We all know the answer. And we all know that what transpired afterwards didn't happen at Newport but in the Manchester Free Trade Hall a year later. But that doesn't fit Mangold's neat and claustrophobically American narrative. Nowhere do we see Bob travel to London and the influence the Swinging Sixties Carnaby Street vibe had on him. He just goes from one scene to the next transformed from shabby folk clothes to extra tight Carnaby Street suits and winkle pickers.  

The problem with the way this film is constructed is that most everyone is a single-dimension character, giving the excellent cast very little to do. Pretty much everyone just looks at Bob with an air of disappointment.  Elle Fanning (The Great) plays Sylvie Russo - a thinly veiled version of Bob's real-life girlfriend Suze Rotolo - and just looks at Bob disappointed and heartbroken.  Monica Barbaro plays folk icon Joan Baez and just looks at Bob disappointed and contemptuous. Peter Seege looks disappointed and paternally heartbroken.  You get the picture.

And what of Bob himself? Timothee Chalamet (DUNE) plays Bob with pads in his cheeks to give him a boyish round-face, and has admirably mastered his growly deliberately ugly style of singing and playing. It's a great impersonation, but for my money, outclassed by Scoot McNairy in the acting department.  You get the ferocity of Bob, his uncompromising attitude toward music.  But the film skips so lightly over his way of mooching off women, or his initial passive-aggressive barb that Joan Baez sings too well.... Imagine a film with this cast that really wanted to get into the verbal attack on Joan in Like A Rolling Stone, or his womanising, or his fundamentally dishonest appropriation of a persona.  

But no, this is a film for fans that wants us to see (rightly) just how bloody brilliant his early music was. Where the film shines is in giving is so much music so brilliantly rendered. But by including so much music it squeezes out the time that could have been spent on personal relationships.  I feel like maybe this was a deliberate choice and a cowardly one too.

A COMPLETE UNKNOWN is rated R and has a running time of 141 minutes.  It was released in the USA on December 14th and opens in the UK on January 17th 2025.