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The 49th Annual Chicago International Film Festival comes to a close tonight, but not without some special discoveries to be seen. I was lucky enough to catch the latest film from the Coen Brothers, Inside Llewyn Davis, and was glad I took a chance on Wolfskinder, a worthy nominee in the “New Directors Competition.” After hearing Jeff Bayer and Eric D. Snider joke about Dracula 3D at Cannes 2012, I finally got to witness its craptitude with my own eyes. Reviews for the films are below.

Working the festival beat, I also partook in some interviews ready in the near future, including chats with David Frankel (director of The Devil Wears Prada and now the Paul Potts biopic One Chance), and the Polsky Brothers for The Motel Life, starring Stephen Dorff and Emile Hirsch. If all goes right tomorrow, I will also have an interview with Oscar Isaac for Inside Llewyn Davis.

• Penn Badgley, on the heels of Gossip Girl ending and his musical starring role in Greetings From Tim Buckley, due out next year, has signed on for the drama Parts Per Billion, alongside Alexis Bledel, Hill Harper, and Teresa Palmer. Directed and written by Brian Horiuchi, the movie also stars Frank Langella, Gena Rowlands, Rosario Dawson, and Josh Hartnett, about three couples dealing with an event that could destroy their relationships. [Deadline]

• Michael Shannon (Boardwalk Empire, Take Shelter) and equably formidable Samantha Morton (John Carter, Control) have been cast as the leads in thriller The Harvest, directed by John McNaughton (Wild...

She'll be reprising her role as the Lady Sif in Thor 2 before too long, but before that, Jaimie Alexander has opted for some less fantastical thrills in Intersection. She'll star alongside Frank Grillo (The Grey) in the murderous tale, which is being directed by David Marconi.Alexander and Grillo play a married couple, but Alexander is cheating on her husband and plotting his death with the help of her lover. The plan goes askew when the husband and his rival are stranded together after a car crash on a remote Moroccan desert road.This being a Europacorp production, Luc Besson is producing along with Gareth Upton (Colombiana), and had a hand in the screenplay. Marconi is credited as a writer on the film too, and this seems to be the first time he's directed since the crime thriller The Harvest in 1992. He also wrote Enemy Of The State and...

Above: Le film à venir (1997).

Notebook is unfurling a series of tributes to Raúl Ruiz entitled Blind Man's Bluff: along with some previously published articles, here in English for the first time, the bulk a compilation of new, shorter pieces from a few generous critics and Ruizians on favorite moments from a vast, subterranean filmography. For more from Raúl Ruiz: Blind Man's Bluff see the Table of Contents.

The Golden Boat (1990)

A man follows a trail of beat-up shoes left discarded along a New York sidewalk. They lead him to an older man, who sits crouched on the street, crying. “This, my son, is not my place,” the older man proclaims—and then stabs himself. So begins The Golden Boat—“a game between soap opera and reality,” as Ruiz called it—his first film in America, made in exile over a few long weekends during a teaching stint at Harvard.