The sweet and compassionate ‘Solitude’ is a modest drama with a big heart.

The sweet and compassionate ‘Solitude’ is a modest drama with a big heart.
‘Woodland’ is an exploration of generational trauma and healing that feels more like a sketch than portrait.
Mexican director Michel Franco follows up his unsettling but well-liked Tim Roth thriller ‘Sundown’ with ‘Memory’, a paint-by-numbers romance/family drama starring Jessica Chastain as an emotionally damaged social worker in Brooklyn
Rural herders, urbanite journalists and a young monk consider the fate of a captured, livestock-ravaging wild animal in “Snow Leopard”, an affective, nuanced and multilayered film bowing out of competition at Venice four months after the death of its Tibetan director Pema Tseden.
Richard Linklater’s farce about a phony hired killer is charming and unpredictable, but it would benefit from dropping the “based on a true story” angle.
Directed by Hiam Abbass’s daughter Lina Soualem, this beautifully layered, quietly intelligent documentary explores her female-centric family’s experiences of dispossession and exile following the 1948 Nakba, seeking to break the silence surrounding trauma.
Starkly opposing views of nature collide in Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s ‘Evil Does Not Exist’ which, despite its portentous title, is simplicity itself and in a minor key after ‘Drive My Car’.
The inability to open oneself to love is the main beast of Bertrand Bonello’s striking and cerebral film that follows a stalled relationship over three time periods, though the message in the central portion doesn’t have the same resonance as the other two.
Dazzling camerawork and an exceptional trio of teenage actors dangle from a weak narrative thread in Alain Parroni’s intense first feature about underprivileged kids growing up without a future.
‘Upon Open Sky’, a Mexican road movie full of restraint and some surprises, premieres in Venice’s Orizzonti section.