VENICE, Italy (Reuters) - Veteran Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski on Wednesday pleaded for more films to made about migrants, saying immigration was one of the world's biggest problems.

LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) - "The Birth of a Nation" will hold a press conference at this year's Toronto Film Festival with director/actor Nate Parker in attendance, Fox Searchlight announced Wednesday.

VENICE (Reuters) - Damien Chazelle's "La La Land", a musical comedy-drama about the joys and pains of pursuing one's dreams, opened the Venice film festival on Wednesday, kicking off days of screenings, parties and red carpet glamour.

LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) - The word "dark," when applied to filmmaking, has become a rather neutral description, because it can mean so many different things. ("Beasts of No Nation" is dark, and so are Todd Solondz movies, as are "Chinatown" and "Deadpool.") But Derek Cianfrance, the writer-director of "Blue Valentine," "The Place Beyond the Pines," and the somber new period romantic weeper "The Light Between Oceans," is a filmmaker who reaches back to a primordial definition of darkness. His films are dark because they hit a nerve of pain -- in his characters, and in the audience, too.

LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) - A disturbingly relevant snapshot of contemporary tensions, Bertrand Bonello's "Nocturama" observes in minute detail how a small group plans and executes a series of terror attacks in Paris before retreating to a luxurious department store. These aren't your garden-variety extremists, but a mix of people of different ages and origins, which makes this sure-to-be-controversial treatment all the more provocative. Working from a nerve-racking script written five years ago -- long before the wave of attacks that started in France on Jan. 7, 2015, with the Charlie Hebdo shooting -- Bonello replies to the news with a magnetic and purely cinematic gesture that may have frightened the Cannes Film Festival selection committee (the touchy film was ready in time for the May edition), but should spark a wide range of reactions when it screens at the Toronto and San Sebastian film festivals, following its domestic opening in France on Aug. 31.

VENICE (Reuters) - A musical with Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, Jude Law as a chain smoking pope and Mel Gibson's come back with a war drama are all tipped as must-sees at the Venice film festival which opens its 73rd edition on the Lido under heightened security on Wednesday.

LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) - Robots, supercomputers, automatons: The history of sci-fi can be boiled down to a laundry list of humanoid machines whose very existence raises the question, "Yes, but do they have feelings?" The title character of "Morgan" is, in many ways, a successor to all those spooky-chilly faux-human techno marvels. Except that Morgan does have feelings. She's not a replicant built out of diodes and synthetic skin; she was bred -- and born -- in a lab out of synthetic DNA. She's a not-so-far-fetched version of a "human" being who emerges out of the era of cloning and the corporate obsession with genetic modification.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Gene Wilder, whose wild curls and startling blue eyes brought a frantic air to roles in the movies "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory," "Young Frankenstein" and "Blazing Saddles," died on Monday at the age of 83, his family said.

LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) - Ben Affleck shared a video, which appears to be test footage of DC Universe villain Deathstroke, on all of his social media accounts on Monday morning. The actor-director posted the cryptic video without comment or explanation.