Focus Features

Park Chan-wook's new movie for Focus Features, vampire flick Thirst, played at Cannes at the end of last week. Before it premiered, I reported on an early rave from Screen International, and now I've collected together a handful of other critical reactions.

Over at the GQ blog, Tom Carson expresses his opinion of the film by comparing Park to one of the giants of cinema:

"Almost every movie of Park's I've seen includes sequences that seem like puzzling or downright boneheaded mistakes as you watch them, yet there'd be something wanting if he'd cut them beforehand. Maybe that's why keeping tabs on South Korea's greatest filmmaker sometimes seems like the closest I'll ever get to the cranky but dazzled way my Sixties forebears used to keep tabs on Godard..."

Maggie Lee of The Hollywood Reporter had a real hunger for what Thirst has to offer, calling it " a torrid expression of predatory instinct and insatiable, all-consuming love" and declaring

"Park takes his famed eroticization of violence, pain and cruelty to new, feverish heights, and garnishes it with deliciously sadistic gallows humor. Those who thrive on gore, twisted sexuality and brutish handling of women can drink their fill from this film."

Blake Ethridge at Cinema is Dope was even more enthusiastic about the film, going as far as to use the "m word":

"Thirst is the first masterpiece of 2009. It’s horrifies you one second, makes you laugh out loud the next and deeply moved in the next. The story is dark as hell and takes you to some dark places of the soul and existence but the way the story gets told never leaves you emotionally detached and never loses its tone."

Patrick Z. McGavin was another big fan of Thirst. In his thoughts on the film written on his Cannes diary over at Stop Smiling, he calls it

"one of the highlights of the first two and a half days of the festival. Park is a meticulous craftsman and a very talented director. He's also a serious cinephile, as evidenced by the extended homages to Hitchcock's Vertigo in Old Boy. Thirst is nominally a vampire film, but it's part of his unorthodox manner that he makes a flamboyant piece of work without being mannered. It's also horrifyingly funny."

Thirst will be released domestically by Focus Features this July.