The 61st Chicago International Film Festival takes next month (October 15-26), and next week on the 22nd, the lineup for the festival will be announced. I attended the festival last year for the first time and had awesome time. It is where I saw September 5 and The Brutalist for the first time. So of course I am headed to Chicago again this year. What I did last year was try and guess what could be there during the 11 days, and looking back, I was 7/17 on picks. Not great, but I also cast a wide net. I did the same thing this year, and while not all of them will be there, I can dream.

A couple of notes on that list. One film is already locked in. It was announced last Wednesday that One Golden Summer will open the festival, so take that spot off the board. Next, my guess for Centerpiece is Wake Up Dead Man. The previous two entries in the Knives Out series have all been Centerpiece selections during the festival (Knives Out in 2019, and Glass Onion in 2022), so it stands within reason that the third entry would do the same. Two other directors have films in the running and have also closed out the festival before. Guillermo del Toro has Frankenstein coming out, and in 2017 he closed out the festival with The Shape of Water. The other director is Noah Baumbach. In 2022, White Noise was the closing film, so the chances Jay Kelly closes out this year are good. What helps the odds that both of those films show up somewhere on the schedule is that they are already showing up in other festivals.