The Cannes favourite James Gray has always excelled at exploring genre through family dynamics, often poignantly drawing on his Jewish upbringing in Queens.

Paper Tiger returns the director to those tropes. Miles Teller plays Irwin Pearl, a cautious reservoir engineer living with his wife, Hester (Scarlett Johansson), and their two sons. Adam Driver is Gary, Irwin’s swaggering older brother, a former NYPD officer who presents himself as a well-connected fixer.

Gary persuades Irwin to join a lucrative canal-redevelopment project tied to Russian mob figures, promising financial security with no risk. Inevitably, the largely imagined jackpot places Irwin’s family in danger. Hester is initially positioned on the margins of the brotherly conflict, but her deteriorating eyesight becomes a significant secret.

The set pieces are impeccable, among them a home-invasion sequence featuring Teller hovering on the stairs as gangsters whisper downstairs, and a dramatic shoot-out in a cornfield. Visually, Paper Tiger recreates grimy late-1980s New York with exquisite period detail. Gray’s long-standing questioning of masculine braggadocio and the fallacy of the American dream remains one of the richest seams in US cinema.