Dark fantasy Holy Motors, which divided critics at Cannes last year, also received nine nominations, including best film and best actor (Denis Lavant).

BBC: Emmanuelle Riva

With Eva Mendes, as an impassive high-fashion model whom Lavant kidnaps.

NEWYORKER: Holy Motors

The sullen French actor and longtime Carax collaborator Denis Lavant, trained as an acrobat, enters a stretch limo, only to emerge as an elderly and infirm woman begging along the Seine.

NEWYORKER: Holy Motors

The meteoric first film by the French director Leos Carax, from 1984, hurls Alex (Denis Lavant), an aspiring filmmaker his own age, out of one desperately romantic relationship and into another, through a permanently nocturnal Parisian atmosphere of poetic coincidences and crazy risks.

NEWYORKER: Boy Meets Girl

The neo-noir plot concerns Marc (Michel Piccoli), an older gangster who pulls Alex (Denis Lavant), the son of his slain cohort, into a plot to break into a laboratory and steal an AIDS-like virus, and finds his mistress, Anna (Juliette Binoche), falling for the younger man.

NEWYORKER: Mauvais Sang