Published Aug 10, 2026, 12:02 PM EDT
Ryan O’Rourke is a Senior News Writer at Collider with a specific interest in all things adult animation, video game adaptations, and the work of Mike Flanagan. He is also an experienced baseball writer with over six years of articles between multiple outlets, most notably FanSided’s CubbiesCrib. Whether it’s taking in a baseball game, a new season of Futurama or Castlevania: Nocturne, or playing the latest From Software title, he is always finding ways to show his fandom. When it comes to gaming and anything that takes inspiration from it, he is deeply opinionated on what’s going on. Outside of entertainment, he’s a graduate of Eureka College with a Bachelor’s in Communication where he honed his craft as a writer. Between The IV Leader at Illinois Valley Community College and The Pegasus at Eureka, he spent the majority of his college career publishing articles on everything from politics to campus happenings and, of course, entertainment for the student body. Those principles he learned covering the 2020 election, Palestine, and so much more are brought here to Collider, where he has gleefully written on everything from the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes to Nathan Lane baby-birding sewer boys.
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Although they’ve only shared the screen once, Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson made cinematic magic when they joined forces. The duo famously starred in Noah Baumbach’s 2019 Best Picture nominee Marriage Story, playing a couple divided across both coasts while in the middle of a messy divorce and custody battle over their son. As dryly comedic as it is devastating, the film earned both actors Oscar nominations for their heartbreaking performances that spiral to increasingly dark places. However, it was their co-star, Laura Dern, who ended up sweeping awards season in a supporting role. Seven years later, Driver and Johansson are now about to reunite in theaters, this time joined by another big name in ***Top Gun: ***Maverick’s Miles Teller.
Instead of fighting with each other, this time the trio of stars will be tangling with the Russian mafia in the crime thriller Paper Tiger. Directed by James Gray, the film is described as a “deeply felt and intense drama,” following two brothers in hot pursuit of the American Dream. However, in trying to hit it big, they become entangled in a scheme that is just a bit too good to be true, winding up on the wrong side of the mob. As they navigate the criminal underworld in search of a way out, the consequences of their actions come home to roost, putting their family in grave danger and straining the ties that bind them together. Desperation and increasing tension between the two may ultimately drive them to betrayal.
With three months left until release, NEON has unveiled the first official trailer, teasing how Gary (Driver) and Irwin Pearl’s (Teller) business and lives come crashing down. Everything unfolds in late 1980s Queens, where the two brothers, one a former cop and the other an engineer, get involved in a venture that seems above board until suddenly, they’re all under the threat of the Russians. Irwin, however, has much more to lose, leading a life on the straight-and-narrow with a wife (Johansson) and kids. The danger will only continue to rise as the mafia becomes more relentless in their violence towards the Pearls and all they love.
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
Gray debuted Paper Tiger at Cannes earlier this year, where it received a ten-minute standing ovation while in competition for the Palme d’Or. Critics mostly praised the gritty gangster family drama, as indicated by a strong 84% on Rotten Tomatoes, with high marks for the starry ensemble. Collider’s Emma Kiely was less high on the film overall in her 6/10 review, but still called it a “perfectly fine crime drama,” adding that “Driver lends an understated bravado and keeps Gary sympathetic even as he creates this whirlpool of disaster.” In an interview with You Know Films’ Alex Noyer in collaboration with Collider at Cannes, Driver hit on that sympathetic side to his character, describing how the film goes beyond just a gangster movie into the realm of tragedy where the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
“I would say it was a failure of best intentions. That’s what makes it kind of tragic. There’s obviously a competition between them that’s subtle, but there is a paternal thing going on, and he’s, I think, doing his best to bring his brother above his station, which I relate to that idea. It is maybe a very American one, but also a universal idea that people are trying to reach beyond their station, but it’s all coming from love and good intentions, which I think pushes it into tragedy. Because of circumstance, it just totally unravels. He tries to do his best and maintain righting the ship until he just can’t anymore.”
Paper Tiger premieres in theaters on November 13. Check out the first trailer in the player above.
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Andrea Bucko, Andrea Leone, Anthony Katagas, Carlo Salem, Gary Farkas, James Gray, Leonardo Maria Del Vecchio, Marco Perego, Raffaella Leone, Rodrigo Teixeira