Tom Hanks in Philadelphia: an Oscar-winning performance

Tom Hanks went to great lengths for his Oscar-winning performance in powerful legal drama Philadelphia.

Tom Hanks gives a commanding performance in Philadelphia.

There’s the whodunit, but here’s a smart, existential thriller that asks the question: whydunnit?

Why did a real-life French armoured car driver (here played by the great Francois Cluzet) turn on his company and engineer a daring robbery that netted him millions of euros?

Director Philippe Goudeau’s 2013 heist thriller 11.6 (Tuesday, 11.40pm, World Movies), the title of which comes from the size of the haul, is less interested in answering that than it is in creating a man whose motives remain tantalisingly elusive, even as his steely smarts are put on full display.

This is a fine twist on a dependable genre.

It is surely a coincidence that, so shortly after the disappearance of acclaimed, record-holding Russian free diver Natalia Molchanova, there’s an airing of director Luc Besson’s 1988 French box office smash The Big Blue (Sunday, 6.35pm, World Movies).

In it, a pair of childhood mates turned rivals compete to see who can reach the furthest depths.

Though drowned by critics, the film clearly struck a nerve, as it is often cited as the most globally successful French film of its decade.

It’s no masterpiece, but for those inclined to the outdoors and underwater worlds, it exerts a certain exotic pull.

Power can have the same magnetic attraction, as can misguided and/or passionate patriotism. Such is the thread that runs through director John Frankenheimer’s still-relevant 1964 Cold War political thriller Seven Days in May (Tuesday, 8.25am, TCM).

Fredric March is the unpopular president whose engineering of an arms treaty with the Soviet Union pushes nationalistic general Burt Lancaster to attempt a coup. Rod Serling’s script is a model of terse economy, and Lancaster is chilling as the military man blinkered to the idea of peaceful coexistence.

Actors can become chameleons in certain roles, with make-up, weight gain/loss and posture just a few of the tools at their disposal. Tom Hanks has done a radical version of this shapeshifting twice in his career, and seven years before his radical weight loss for Cast Away he won an Oscar for his similarly emaciated lawyer and AIDS sufferer in Jonathan Demme’s powerful legal drama Philadelphia (Saturday, 6.20pm, Masterpiece Movies).

Denzel Washington co-stars as the only lawyer willing to take the solicitor’s wrongful termination lawsuit, but it was Hanks who won the Best Actor Oscar that year.

Not to let his rail-thin appearance go for naught, the actor next appeared in Forrest Gump — and won an Best Actor Academy Award for that performance too, joining Spencer Tracy as the only other actor to pull that off to date.

11.6 (M) 4 stars

Tuesday, 11.40pm, World Movies (430)

Philadelphia (PG) 4 stars

Saturday, 6.20pm, Masterpiece Movies (402)

Seven Days in May (G) 3.5 stars

Tuesday, 8.25am, TCM (428)