Museum of the Moving Image - MoMIFeaturing films selected by the Queens-born-and-raised director

The seven-film series includes a preview screening of Paper Tiger, Gray’s latest film, with the director in person on November 12

Astoria, New York (October 26, 2026) — Our most authentic contemporary craftsman of New York cinema, Queens-born-and-raised James Gray has been directing bracing, gripping, and beautifully made films set across the city’s boroughs over the past three decades. On the occasion of the release of Paper Tiger, one of his greatest achievements, Museum of the Moving Image presents a selection of films set in New York personally chosen by Gray, from monolithic classics to lesser-known titles, that express the complicated, multifaceted character of the city itself, November 7–22.
 
The series James Gray’s New York will feature seven films, including a special sneak preview of Paper Tiger with Gray in person (November 12) and his masterful The Immigrant (November 8). Alongside these titles, Gray has chosen the following New York films: John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy, Abraham Polonsky’s Force of Evil, Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, William Friedkin’s The French Connection, and Anthony Mann’s Side Street.
 
MoMI’s Senior Curator of Film Michael Koresky said, “From the Brooklyn outskirts of Little Odessa to the turn-of-the-century Lower East Side of The Immigrant to this year’s heart-rending family crime drama Paper Tiger, set between Queens and Brooklyn, his films extend a valuable and endangered tradition of homegrown cinema on a grand scale. He’s one of our favorite American filmmakers working today.”
 
“It’s truly a great honor to have my work selected by Museum of the Moving Image for this screening series alongside five films that have provided me with inspiration over the years,” said James Gray. “Growing up in Queens and having interned at MoMI myself many years ago, I know well how meaningful the Museum’s work has been. MoMI is, first and foremost, an institution committed to art and cinema for the neighborhood audience, and I couldn’t be prouder to be part of the community of filmmakers chosen to represent my hometown borough.”
 
NEON releases Paper Tiger in select theaters November 13, everywhere Thanksgiving.
 
 
SCHEDULE FOR ‘JAMES GRAY’S NEW YORK,’ NOVEMBER 7–22, 2026
All screenings take place in the Sumner M. Redstone Theater and/or the Celeste and Armand Bartos Theater at Museum of the Moving Image, 36-01 35 Ave, Astoria, NY, 11106. Advance tickets and more information available at movingimage.org/jamesgraynewyork.
 
Midnight Cowboy
Saturday, November 7, 6:00 p.m.
Dir. John Schlesinger. 1969, 113 mins. U.S. DCP. With Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight, Sylvia Miles, Brenda Vaccaro. John Voight’s wannabe gigolo Joe Buck leaves Texas and winds up hustling on 42nd Street, bonding with the blighted block’s genius loci, Dustin Hoffman’s tubercular petty thief Ratzo Rizzo. Adapting a book by James Leo Herlihy, screenwriter Waldo Salt and British director John Schlesinger (in his first American film) fashioned something so brutally honest and daring that it became an instant sensation. Probably the most desperately romantic New York movie of its era, John Schlesinger’s astonishing, downtrodden Midnight Cowboy won three Oscars including Best Picture despite being the first major studio production released with an X.
 
The Immigrant
Sunday, November 8, 2:15 p.m.
Dir. James Gray. 2014, 114 mins. U.S. DCP. With Marion Cotillard, Joaquin Phoenix, Jeremy Renner, Angela Sarafyan. Wide-eyed Ewa arrives to Ellis Island from Poland in 1921 with her sister, shivering and disoriented, and hoping to connect with her aunt in Brooklyn. Things immediately descend into confusion, and she finds herself alone on the Lower East Side, where she must scramble her way towards a new life. James Gray’s exquisitely mounted drama of New York immigrant lives at the turn of the last century forgoes period piece grandstanding in favor of finely etched authenticity. Building to an emotional crescendo of romantic sacrifice, Gray’s film, shot by the great Darius Khondji with subtle expressionism, is a hypnotic story of a woman freeing herself from subjugation as the country around her is still coming into focus.
 
Force of Evil
Sunday, November 8, 3:00 p.m.
Dir. Abraham Polonsky. 1948, 79 mins. U.S. DCP restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive and The Film Foundation with funding provided by The Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. With John Garfield, Thomas Gomez, Beatrice Pearson, Marie Windsor, Roy Roberts. A jewellike masterpiece of film noir, blacklisted director and writer Abraham Polonsky’s classic is a pure dose of moral fatalism, starring the great John Garfield as an unscrupulous Wall Street lawyer who has no qualms about getting into business with a mobster. His scheme ultimately invades the peaceful life of his more honest brother, played by Thomas Gomez. A shot to the heart of greed, this commentary on the dark effects of capitalism is an evocatively shot cornerstone of 1940s New York cinema, with a famous climax set by the George Washington Bridge.
 
Raging Bull
Sunday, November 8, 4:45 p.m.
Dir. Martin Scorsese. 1980, 129 mins. 35mm. With Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, Cathy Moriarty. With Raging Bull, Scorsese turned the boxing movie on its head, forgoing every cliché to create an indelible work of art. In an Oscar-winning role, De Niro is Jake La Motta, whose life story is dramatized with a mix of Shakespearean tragedy and documentary-like realism, while Pesci and Moriarty received nominations for their spectacular work as Jake’s brother and second wife. With nearly anthropological detail, Scorsese and De Niro make La Motta into the ultimate inscrutable human animal, fueled by passion and self-destruction. Michael Chapman’s glistening black-and-white cinematography is one of the glories of contemporary cinema.
 
PREVIEW SCREENING
Paper Tiger with James Gray in person
Thursday, November 12, 6:30 p.m.
Dir. James Gray. 2026, 115 mins. U.S. DCP. With Adam Driver, Scarlett Johnansson, Miles Teller, Gavin Goudey, Roman Engel. Recreating a finely rendered—and personally remembered—New York of the mid 1980s, James Gray has constructed a classical moral drama of tragic proportions that is among his greatest achievements. Equal parts tender and sinister, the film stars Adam Driver as Gary Pearl, a former NYC police officer who tries to help his middle-class Queens family-man brother Irving (a tremendous Miles Teller) make some extra money by looping him in on a “sure thing” deal with some local Russians working the Gowanus Canal. When things don’t go as planned, the film charts the mounting, fearful consequences of this get-rich-quick scheme. A deeply felt tale of loyalty and sacrifice, Paper Tiger features expressive widescreen photography and sensationally moving performances from Driver, Teller, and Johansson, who is mesmerizing as Irving’s wife Hester, clinging to terrible secrets of her own.
 
The French Connection
Saturday, November 14, 4:00 p.m.
Dir. William Friedkin. 1971, 104 mins. U.S. DCP. With Gene Hackman, Roy Scheider, Fernando Rey, Tony Lo Bianco. “I felt this was a kind of crude poem to the city,” said director William Friedkin about this emotionally complex action masterpiece about an ethically dubious New York City cop, “Popeye” Doyle, who will do anything to take down a ring of foreign heroin smugglers. The justly celebrated car and elevated subway chase through Bensonhurst required an actual Transit Authority motorman on set and five weeks to complete. Friedkin’s breakthrough won Best Picture and four other Oscars, including Gene Hackman for Best Actor.

Side Street
Sunday, November 22, 1:00 p.m.
Dir. Anthony Mann. 1949, 83 mins. 35mm. With Farley Granger, Cathy O’Donnell, James Craig. A part-time letter carrier foolishly steals $30,000 from gangsters and is soon on the run from them and the police. Mann returned to the city of his youth to direct this shattering film noir that reunites Granger with They Live by Night co-star Cathy O’Donnell. Following in the post-World War II tradition of such semi-documentary thrillers as The Naked City, Side Street makes spectacular use of New York locations as the tortured protagonist wanders everywhere from Midtown to Greenwich Village, from South Street Seaport to skid row, culminating in a gripping (and symbolic) car chase through the financial district.
 
About Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI)
MoMI celebrates the history, art, technology, and future of the moving image in all of its forms. Located in Astoria, New York, the Museum presents exhibitions; screenings; discussion programs featuring actors, directors, and creative leaders; and education programs. It houses the nation’s most comprehensive collection of moving image artifacts and screens over 500 films annually. Its exhibitions—including the core exhibition Behind the Screen and The Jim Henson Exhibition—are noted for their integration of material objects, interactive experiences, and audiovisual presentations. For more information about the MoMI, visit movingimage.org.

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