My 10 Picks for the Chicago International Film Festival

Thursday, Sept 22nd, marks the first day that non-Cinema/Chicago members can purchase or redeem tickets to this year's Chicago International Film Festival.  I've got my 10 films chosen for my MOVIEGOER PASS and I can't wait to see them!  Here's the lineup for me:

NOBODY ELSE BUT YOU
ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA
SMUGGLER
THE GIANTS
HERE
THE STUDENT
SOUTHWEST
ON THE BRIDGE

and

SHORTS 1: CITY & STATE
SHORTS 3: MIDNIGHT MAYHEM

I'm eager to see them all, but the two that I'm most excited for are Nobody Else But You and Smuggler.

From MUBI.com:

Neo-noir fun, with a playful pulp paperback sensibility, Nobody Else But You is a stylish comic whodunit-cum-romance that pays tribute to a host of thriller writers – and, as the title suggests, to the memory of Marilyn Monroe. Jean-Paul Rouve plays David, a crime novelist who finds himself stuck without inspiration and stranded in Mouthe, a snowbound commune in Eastern France. He arrives just as the region has lost its local celebrity, bottle-blonde weather girl Candice, under mysterious circumstances. Realising that there’s a book in it for him, David finds that many of the locals have something to hide – but more importantly, he comes closer than anyone to knowing the secrets of a misunderstood small-town girl whose own story has unnerving parallels with the Monroe legend. This witty entertainment riffs cheerfully on thriller conventions while taking its story seriously, and a fine cast is headed by the affably battered Rouve and Sophie Quinton as the mercurial Candice. The white-blanketed snowscapes bring inescapable echoes of Fargo, but Pierre Cottereau’s superb photography gives the film its own vivid comic-strip sensibility. -BFI

From ChicagoFilmFest.com:
From the man who created the celebrated “O-Ren Ishii” animated sequence in Kill Bill, Vol. 1 comes this stylish and outrageous but brutal film that makes Tarantino’s work look like family fare. In serious debt to local gangsters, Kinuta is coerced into taking a job as a smuggler of dead bodies for the Japanese underworld, only to find himself caught in the middle of a bloody gang war. Based on the popular eponymous manga, Smuggler has all the makings of a midnight classic.
 
Reviews will follow!