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All amnesiac thrillers get off to an intriguing start then tend to fall away when their heroes and heroines start to recover their memories. The first half-hour of the Danish ID:a is consistently gripping, as its beautiful heroine awakes in a French river with a scar, a gun, a bag containing €2m and no identity. Her search to discover her past takes her to Denmark, Holland and back to France, and includes some agreeable suspense, a great deal of violence, some rather vague leftwing politics and some narrative holes.

ID:a is worth a visit, as is The Woman in the Fifth, Pawel Pawlikowski's first film since My Summer of Love seven years ago and his first thriller. Not exactly an amnesia film but pretty close, it's based on a novel by Douglas Kennedy, the American writer resident in London, whose novel The Big Picture was filmed in France two...

The Big Picture explores a question that has long fascinated readers and writers – the situation of people who disappear from their everyday lives to hide, take on new identities or are never seen again. In real life, the inventor Rudolf Diesel and the writer Ambrose Bierce both disappeared in 1913; in 1920, the ex-Labour MP Victor Grayson vanished in London, possibly abducted to prevent him exposing governmental corruption. In his short story Wakefield, Nathaniel Hawthorne explores the mind of a middle-class Victorian Londoner who drops out to hide for 20 years a street away from his old home, and in The Third Man Graham Greene (possibly borrowing the idea from Eric Ambler's The Mask of Dimitrios) created an antihero who fakes his own death. In Patricia Highsmith's twice-filmed The Talented Mr Ripley, a villain takes over the identity of a dead man, a device brilliantly used in Antonioni's The Passenger and...

Xavier Beauvois' "Of Gods and Men" dominated the nominations of the 36th Annual Cesar Awards, the French equivalent of the Oscars. "Of Gods" received 11 nominations total and will compete against Heartbreaker (L'Arnacoeur), Gainsbourg (Vie Heroique), Mammuth, Le Nom Des Gens, The Ghost Writer, and On Tour for Best Film.

The Social Network, Invictus, Inception, Illegal, The Secret In Their Eyes, Bright Star, and Les Amours Imaginaires will duke it out for the Best Foreign Film category.

Jodie Foster will preside over the ceremony and Quentin Tarantino will be given an honorary Cesar award. The 36th Annual Cesar Awards will be held on Feb. 25th.

Here is the full list of nominees:

Best Film

Heartbreaker (L'Arnacoeur), dir: Pascal Chaumeil

Of Gods and Men (Des Hommes Et Des Dieu), dir: Xavier Beauvois

Gainsbourg (Vie Heroique), dir: Joann Sfar

Mammuth, dir: Benoit Delepine, Gustave Kervern

Le Nom Des Gens, dir: Michel Leclerc

The Ghost Writer,...

Marina Fois attends L'Homme Qui Voulait Vivre Sa Vie" (The Big Picture ) Premiere, Rome.Photo copyright Insidefoto / PR Photos. Marina Fois attends L'Homme Qui Voulait Vivre Sa Vie" (The Big Picture ) Premiere, Rome.Photo copyright Insidefoto / PR Photos. Marina Fois attends L'Homme Qui Voulait Vivre Sa Vie" (The Big Picture ) Premiere, Rome.Photo copyright Insidefoto / PR Photos. Marina Fois attends L'Homme Qui Voulait Vivre Sa Vie" (The Big Picture ) Premiere, Rome.Photo copyright Insidefoto / PR Photos. Marina Fois attends L'Homme Qui Voulait Vivre Sa Vie" (The Big Picture ) Premiere, Rome.Photo copyright Insidefoto / PR Photos.