HD Highlights: August 14

Sky Movies Premiere: Drive (Sky 20, 8.30, 5.1) Drive’s sleek surface sheen is sensational but extreme violence and reckless plotting tarnish what could have been a vintage thriller. Ryan Gosling plays a self-contained, ultra-cool getaway driver who, out of love for a vulnerable woman (Carey Mulligan) and loyalty to a luckless friend (Bryan Cranston), risks his life to save theirs from LA gangsters Albert Brooks and Ron Perlman. The first half of Drive is a dynamite mix of action, character and soul but the second underwhelms as a perfunctory revenge vehicle punctuated by sadistic bloodshed. (2011) ✭✭✭✩

❑ Kings Cross ER (TV3, 8.00) It’s all hands on deck in the resus bay as the emergency team treat a man who has fallen in front of a moving truck during an alcohol-fuelled street brawl. ✭✭✭✩

First Crossings (TV One, 8.30) Kevin Bigger and Jamie Fitzgerald retrace the unbelievable survival story of David Loweniston and nine other stranded sealers, who were marooned on the Open Bay Islands in 1810. After finding the sealers’ original hut, thought to be the oldest surviving European-made stone structure in New Zealand, they travel to the mainland in an old sealing boat before attempting to cross the Southern Alps. ✭✭✭✭