16. Thirst (2009)
Finally, there's a vampire movie worthy of the title
The Hunger -- even if it arrives under the more potable name
Thirst. Carnal appetite, not a parched palate, is the accelerant that fuels this perverse, prankish, and merrily anti-clerical exercise in bloodletting from Park Chan-wook, the South Korean director whose films function like the moral-retribution mechanisms in the
Saw movies -- traps with no way out but a permanently scarring exit. ¶ Vampirism would seem an unusually...genteel diversion for Park, best known for the "Vengeance Trilogy," which reached its apex with the Jacobean cruelties of 2003's devious
Oldboy. Starting with 2002's byzantine kidnapping-gone-awry saga
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, the former film critic and onetime philosophy student has made his subject (and method) the self-destroying machinery of violence. Once somebody throws a switch, the unstoppable gears of his plots mangle the guiltless and the guilty alike. -- Jim Ridley