A tender thriller of bonds and fissures

SOME THRILLERS ARE ENJOYABLE ENOUGH WHILE you're watching, then vaporize the instant the credits roll.

- STEPHANIE ZACHAREK

Like night and day: Teller, left, and Driver play dissimilar brothers

But there's a rarer kind that follows you home with the feeling you're being shadowed by a thief, stirring a fear of loss that wasn't there before.

Writer-director James Gray's Paper Tiger-which played in competition at the Cannes Film Festivalis that second kind. It's about a family whose members don't know how happy they are until suddenly they aren't. It's about brothers who both resent and look after one another, the loneliness of being a parent when you can't protect your children. In places, this picture is wrenchingly tense, playing on the audience's nerves the way you'd tighten the pegs on a violin. Paper Tiger is old school in the best way, the kind of movie so many American directors have forgotten how to make, if they ever learned at all.