Baby Driver is a stylish thriller that I thoroughly enjoyed. Like this year’s other surprise critical and box-office hit, Get Out, it is a film that breathes new life into a tired genre. With Get Out, it was the horror film, with Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver, it’s the heist and chase film.

Ansel Elgort (The Fault in Our Stars) is the baby-faced would-be musical producer who acts as a getaway driver for master criminal Kevin Spacey as a means of paying off a debt. Suffering from tinnitus since the auto accident that killed his parents when he was a child, he is constantly listening to music from his iPod to drown out the humming the tinnitus causes.

Forced to drive teams of three, the music in his ears also helps drown out the absurdities coming out of the mouths of the bad guys, which include the likes of Jamie Foxx and Jon Hamm who he is forced to drive on bank robberies and eventually the robbery of a post office while making moves to protect the lives of several innocents. Along the way, he falls in love with waitress Lily James (Cinderella) who, like him, loves to burst into song at odd moments. His come mostly in his scenes with his wheelchair-bound foster father, lovingly played by deaf actor CJ Jones.

The chase scenes are up-to-the-minute state-of-the-art and very well done, but the story is old-fashioned and charming in the style of a 1930s crime movie in which the bad guys get their just desserts and everything turns out OK for the good guys. The superb soundtrack is also an asset.

Baby Driver is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Even if you’re not a fan of Murdoch Mysteries, the Canadian TV series now in its 11th year, you should enjoy Once Upon a Murdoch Christmas, a full-length feature film presented as a Christmas special last year. The beautifully constructed film begins on a train in the early part of the 20th Century, which is hijacked, but from which nothing is taken except expensive gifts. Soon, other thefts occur on the streets of Toronto as well-to-do residents attempt to rush home with their Christmas treasures. When most of the gifts are returned to the store from which they were purchased in exchange for cheap coats and shoes for the poor, it is obvious that the thief is a 20th Century Robin Hood. A subplot involving orphans, diphtheria, and a female doctor the children believe to be the snow queen, add to the mystery. The ending compares favorably to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol with the town’s wealthiest curmudgeon chagrined into helping the poor, including the town’s very own version of Tiny Tim.

Once Upon a Murdoch Christmas is not to be confused with the series’ 2015 Christmas movie, A Murdoch Mysteries Christmas, which was full of mayhem and murder, an altogether inappropriate holiday presentation. This one rectifies all that in spades. Both are available on Blu-ray and standard DVD, as are the full first ten seasons of the series.

Jack London (1876-1916) was the bestselling, highest paid, and most popular American author of his time. His much filmed Call of the Wild is being prepared for yet another version in 2019. His The Sea Wolf, which was first filmed as a short in 1906, then as the first full-length film in 1913, was remade in 1920, 1926, and as an early sound film in 1930. It was last seen in a 2009 TV miniseries. The most famous version, however, was the 1941 film version originally released at 100 minutes, but cut to 87 minutes for its 1947 re-release on a double bill with The Sea Hawk. That’s the version that has been seen on TV ever since. Never released on home video until now, Warner Archive has found the film’s missing 13 minutes and seamlessly restored them to the film, which is now available on Blu-ray.

Directed by Michael Curtiz (Casablanca) from a script by Robert Rossen (The Hustler), this version of The Sea Wolf holds its own against any sea-going adventure including Mutiny on the Bounty and Moby Dick. Edward G. Robinson’s cruel, sadistic captain is both the monster Charles Laughton was in the 1935 version of Mutiny on the Bounty and the crazed madman Gregory Peck ended up as in the 1956 version of Moby Dick. John Garfield as an adventurer and Alexander Knox as a sensitive writer are playing the two sides of author London’s persona. All three actors are at their best. They are matched by Ida Lupino as an escaped convict, Gene Lockhart as a nervous doctor, and Barry Fitzgerald as a duplicitous cook. Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s score is one of his best.

Also making their Blu-ray debuts are T-Men, Avanti!, The Flamingo Kid, and The Hidden.

The ClassicFlix Blu-ray of Anthony Mann’s 1947 film noir, T-Men is a state-of-the-art rendering of the film that has too long been confined to public domain hell. The cinematography of John Alton (Elmer Gantry) comes thrillingly alive as Treasury agents Dennis O’Keefe and Alfred Ryder go undercover to ferret out a gang of counterfeiters in Los Angeles. Wallace Ford and Charles McGraw co-star.

Billy Wilder’s 1972 comedy Avanti! was based on a flop 1968 Broadway play by Samuel Taylor (Sabrina), considerably expanded in the script by Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond (The Apartment). Although it has its charms, the film’s 140-minute running time is far too long for what is basically a one-note comedy about an uptight American businessman (Jack Lemmon) who travels to Italy to retrieve the body of his father who died in an automobile accident, only to discover that his father had a mistress who was also killed in the crash. What ensues is a comedy of errors as Lemmon and the dead woman’s daughter (Juliet Mills) come to an understanding while the bodies disappear, then reappear, and another body is eventually substituted for the father’s so he can be buried in Italy with his mistress.

Garry Marshall’s second film as a director, 1984’s The Flamingo Kid, is a nicely done coming-of-age film about a recent high school graduate (Matt Dillon) who discovers during the summer of 1963 that the slick businessman (Richard Crenna) he idolizes is not all he seems and the old-fashioned father (Hector Elizondo) he dismisses, is.

Best known for 1985’s Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddie’s Revenge, Jack Sholder’s best film is the one he made right after that, 1987’s The Hidden, a smart sci-fi horror film about an alien who inhabits one body after another as he is tracked down by an alien cop masquerading as an FBI agent (Kyle MacLachlan) and an L.A. cop (Michael Nouri). The action is fast and furious and the ending is uncharacteristically sweet for the genre in this nicely done thriller.

This week’s new releases include Spider-Man: Homecoming and the Criterion Edition Blu-ray of Barry Lyndon.