Weekend Movie Forecast: The Cove or Funny People

Thirst, the new film from Korean director Park Chan-wook (Old Boy, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance), is about a priest who turns into a vampire after a bad blood transfusion. Salon's Andrew O'Hehir deems it "a brilliant and gruesome work of cinematic invention as well as a passionate and painful human love story. Park is so often celebrated as a stylist—some of the credit should go to his cinematographer, Chung Chung-hoon—that people don't notice how wonderfully he works with actors... I'd qualify that glowing endorsement by saying that Park's risk-taking doesn't always pay off. Thirst goes on too long, drags in places, and can't always manage its unstable balance of horror, romance and comedy. When the result is a daring crazy-quilt of a movie that's not quite like anything you've ever seen before, I'll take it."