Dir: Derek Cianfrance; Starring: Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, Rachel Weisz, Florence Clery, Jack Thompson, Bryan Brown. 12A cert, 133 mins.

The Light Between Oceans, the new film from Derek Cianfrance, is mostly set on Janus Rock, a wind-bitten, froth-flecked island 100 miles off the coast of Australia. As I watched, I my face felt raw and stung with salt, which had something to do with its vivid evocations of landscape and climate, but perhaps more with the steady stream of tears that began trickling down my cheeks after half an hour or so and didn’t stop until after the lights came up.

Cianfrance, the director of Blue Valentine and The Place Beyond the Pines, has come to Venice with a tour de force weepie – albeit one that loses none of the moral intricacy and novelistic scope of his earlier work, nor its curiosity about the fragile fastenings between one generation and the next. (It’s his first film to actually be based on a novel, the same-titled debut by the Australian author M L Stedman.)