Classic underworld thriller

THERE'S nothing like a good crime thriller to get the blood moving and recalibrate one's moral compass.

Britt Ekland and Michael Caine in Get Carter.

THERE'S nothing like a good crime thriller to get the blood moving and recalibrate one's moral compass.

Nicolas Winding Refn's 2011 sensation Drive (Sunday, 8.30pm, M Premiere) is a neon-drenched Los Angeles-set film noir in which taciturn getaway driver Ryan Gosling breaks his lifelong hands-off code to help a neighbour in distress only to find himself embroiled in the complex affairs of quietly psychotic gangster Bernie Rose (Albert Brooks).

For the first time in a career that stretches back to Pusher in the mid-90s, Winding Refn was able to mesh his enthusiasm for jagged, amoral violence with a more commercial approach. And though his subsequent film Only God Forgives has its fervent fans and in fact won the grand prize at this year's Sydney Film Festival, it marks a return to the director's more unpleasant concerns, proving success will not spoil his darker instincts.

A more classic, and to many more palatable, entry in the genre is the 1971 Michael Caine starrer Get Carter (Saturday, 6.30pm, TCM), in which the actor plays a London gangster returning to his northeast England home town to investigate the death of his brother.

In his directorial debut, Mike Hodges already displays a firm command of the material, direction of actors and the kind of terse, underworld tone that would serve him well in such subsequent films as 1998's Croupier (which launched Clive Owen's career) and 2003's I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, which bears a striking narrative resemblance to Get Carter.

Legend has it that when the young Paul Thomas Anderson showed up at the door of the famed Sundance screenwriters lab with a script called Sydney under his arm and the ambition that would lead to Boogie Nights, There Will be Blood and The Master, the instructors were so impressed with the work, they encouraged him not to change a word.

The subsequent 1996 film, Hard Eight (Friday, 8.35pm, M Masterpiece), stars later Anderson regulars John C. Reilly as a forlorn young man and Philip Baker Hall as the veteran gambler who takes him under his wing to learn the ropes in Las Vegas and Reno. Gwyneth Paltrow gives one of her better performances to date as the cocktail waitress who marries Reilly, Samuel L. Jackson has a typically nasty turn as a heavy and a young Philip Seymour Hoffman can be glimpsed as well. Hard Eight has but a single screening this month. Highly recommended.

As magisterial as it is thrilling, Sergio Leone's 1984 underworld masterpiece Once Upon a Time in America (Thursday, 3.20pm, M Thriller/Crime) stars Robert De Niro as ringleader of a quartet of childhood chums turned mobsters in Manhattan's Lower East Side from the 1920s to the 80s. This genre-defining epic, Leone's final film before his death in 1989, is a must for any fan of underworld-related cinema.

CRITIC'S CHOICE
Once Upon a Time in America (MA15+)
4.5 stars
Thursday, 3.20pm, M Thriller Crime

Hard Eight (MA15+)
4 stars
Friday, 8.35pm, M Masterpiece

Drive (MA15+)
4 stars
Sunday, 8.30pm, M Premiere