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 years ago as L'homme qui voulait vivre sa vie starring Romain Duris. Ethan Hawke plays Tom Ricks, an emotionally and sartorially frayed American university teacher and author of one novel, who goes to Paris in an attempt to patch up his failed marriage to a French woman and see his six-year-old daughter. He wakes up in the suburbs on a bus, his suitcase and wallet stolen, and finds a room at a seedy hotel. Thereafter nothing is as it seems. A sinister Arab confiscates his passport and gives him a curious night-time surveillance job. He gets involved with a menacing black neighbour, a young Polish waitress, a seductive Anglo-Romanian femme fatale (Kristin Scott Thomas) who works as a translator, and there's a peculiarly sordid murder. This is the nightmare territory of Cornell Woolrich, David Goodis and other American pulp authors much loved by Série noire readers, and Pawlikowski takes us on an edgy voyage au bout de la nuit.