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Netflix, AMC and Disney are going after the increasingly lucrative and global anime market, seeing it as a way to broaden their appeal to younger audiences, but Crunchyroll remains the most versatile and formidable anime streamer in the arena, according to experts, who say it would take “years” for the streaming giants to get anywhere close to the Sony-backed company’s “borderline monopoly” status.

It’s not for lack of trying: Between splashy partnerships, expensive acquisitions and attempts to find a seat within the tight-knit Japanese production committee system, streamers are pushing hard against Crunchyroll. While none are quite ready to go up against Sony’s all-in-one anime streaming empire, the recent business moves rivals have made could even out the playing field over time.

“Anybody who wants to go toe-to-toe with Crunchyroll and really compete with them — one, it would take a couple of years. No one is directly suited for it currently,...

All those British crime films once deemed undesirable for the National Image are beginning to get the attention they deserve. This story of a single day in a working class section of London has plenty of criminal activity but blends it in with the everyday crimes of desperation and boredom. The Sandigate girls are flirting with trouble but Googie Withers’ Rose Sandigate has gone much further: she’s hiding an escaped fugitive who was once her lover in the vain hope of recapturing her lost youth. Director Robert Hamer examines a dozen distinctive characters on the edge of respectability, in one of the most original ‘Brit noirs’ we’ve seen to date.

It Always Rains on Sunday

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1947 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 92 min. / Street Date November 5, 2019 / available through Kino Lorber / 24.95

Starring: Googie Withers, John McCallum, Jack Warner, Edward Chapman, Susan Shaw, Patricia Plunkett, Nigel Stock, David Lines, Sydney Tafler,...

Jean Kent: British film star and ‘Last of the Gainsborough Girls’ dead at 92 (photo: actress Jean Kent in ‘Madonna of the Seven Moons’) News outlets and tabloids — little difference these days — have been milking every little drop from the unexpected and violent death of The Fast and the Furious franchise actor Paul Walker, and his friend and business partner Roger Rodas this past Saturday, November 30, 2013. Unfortunately — and unsurprisingly — apart from a handful of British publications, the death of another film performer on that same day went mostly underreported. If you’re not "in" at this very moment, you may as well have never existed. Jean Kent, best known for her roles as scheming villainesses in British films of the 1940s and Gainsborough Pictures’ last surviving top star, died on November 30 at West Suffolk Hospital in Bury St Edmunds, England. The previous day, she had suffered a fall at her...

The Queen enjoys vintage royal footage, while Derek Jacobi's Sidney Turtlebaum character is set to ride again

Royal album

Trash was thrilled to witness the Queen visiting BFI Southbank last week as the old place celebrated its 60th birthday. The Queen appeared to enjoy the film presentation in the venerable National Film Theatre and, dressed in elegant purple coat and hat, flashed a satisfied smile at me – or so I like to think – as she walked along the aisle to the exit. She had just been treated to some lovely stuff from the BFI archive, including Scenes at Balmoral (1896), the first known filmed images of a British monarch, which depicted Queen Victoria and Tsar Nicholas II in the grounds of the Scottish castle.

Her Majesty – it's "Ma'am as in jam", according to the protocol instructions I received – must have then been very moved to see home cine footage from...

Ealing Studios' name is synonymous with comedy largely because of three films released on consecutive weeks in 1949: Passport to Pimlico, Whisky Galore! and Kind Hearts and Coronets. Before then it was associated with the form of realism created by the documentarists Alberto Cavalcanti and Harry Watt, brought in by Michael Balcon early in the second world war to give his studio a greater authenticity. The finest movie in this mode is It Always Rains on Sunday, made in 1947 in grimy, Blitz-scarred east London and being revived in a new print as an example of the darker side of Ealing in the BFI Southbank's Ealing retrospective. Superbly photographed by the great Douglas Slocombe in the Picture Post manner, a style radically different from the elegant Kind Hearts and Coronets, it's 24 hours in the life of Bethnal Green, cleverly dovetailing the lives of some 20 characters ranging from spivs, petty crooks...

Skyfall (12A)

(Sam Mendes, 2012, UK/Us) Daniel Craig, Javier Bardem, Judi Dench, 143 mins

It starts with a bang, but ends with a poignant whimper. This is supposedly a smarter Bond, you see, giving you first-class action and breathtaking imagery, but also a Freudian look into the secret agent's psyche. A pity, then, that the plot is utter nonsense. Bardem's Joker-ish baddie isn't interested in world domination; he has a personal score to settle, and an unfeasibly cunning plan…

Elena (12A)

(Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2011, Rus) Nadezhda Markina, Andrey Smirnov. 109 mins

The Return director finds form with a penetrating look at class resentment in money-obsessed modern Russia, perfect conditions for a noir-ish drama. Markina is magnificent as a hard-up divorcee, who does what she has to when her wealthy partner begins to ail.

Room 237 (15)

(Rodney Ascher, 2012, Us) 102 mins

This investigation into the myriad interpretations of Kubrick's The Shining goes far deeper than anyone needed,...

Kind Hearts director Robert Hamer shows the same masterly ensemble control two years earlier in this East End melodrama

Robert Hamer's brilliant, brittle melodrama of London's East End, originally released in 1947, came out two years before his masterpiece Kind Hearts and Coronets. It shows the same masterly ensemble control. The film is in many ways a precursor to kitchen-sink movies like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning – and that huge, teeming market scene bears comparison with Carné's Les Enfants du Paradis. It follows a typical Sunday in a working-class neighbourhood. It's raining of course, but there's nothing dull and Sunday-ish about what's going to happen. Googie Withers is Rose, a former barmaid who has settled for marriage with a dull but steady widower with children. Handsome escaped convict Tommy Swann (John McCallum) turns up in their garden shed, pleading for help: she and Tommy were once sweethearts and his reappearance...

1948 was a good year for mermaids.

In Britain, producer Betty E. Box presented Miranda, starring Glynis Johns as a Cornish water-nymph who goes on dry land disguised as an invalid, making merry with the menfolk. Six years later, a sequel, Mad About Men, continued the character's amorous adventures in Technicolor.

Meanwhile in America, William Powell romanced mute mermaid Ann Blyth, an apparent manifestation of his mid-life crisis, in Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid. (Tarzan and the Mermaids, the same year, did not supply any true amphbious ladies.)

What do these fish stories reveal about their respective countries of origin? None of the films' directors have much in the way of auteur credentials—Ken Annakin directed the first Miranda film, staying true to the tradition of innocuous entertainment which was the defining quality of his career, and Ralph Thomas directed the second: though his son Jeremy has produced major films for Bertolucci and Cronenberg,...

While New Yorkers have plenty of opportunity to see classic films on the big screen, you'll be hard pressed to find a lineup as front to back awesome as the Film Society Of Lincoln Center's "15 For 15: Celebrating Rialto Pictures."

The series honors the reknowned arthouse distribution shingle founded in 1997 that has brought some of the best known (and previously unknown) classics of cinema to American audiences. And the selection here by programmers Scott Foundas, Eric Di Bernardo and Adrienne Halpern represents the breadth and scope of the films Rialto has put their stamp on, ranging from the French New Wave ("Breathless") to film noir ("Rififi") to comedy ("Billy Liar") and more. There is something here for everybody and with the series kicking off tonight, we've got a special prize for some lucky readers.

Courtesy of Film Society Of Lincoln Center, we've got a copy of the excellent Rialto DVD...

Veteran British actress Googie Withers has died at the age of 94.

The star, born Georgette Lizette Withers, passed away at her home in Sydney, Australia on Friday. No further information was available as WENN went to press.

Withers was working as a dancer in London's West End when she was asked to be an extra in the 1935 movie The Girl in the Crowd - but she ended up with a main role after director Michael Powell fired a lead actress.

She went on to rack up credits in films such as The Gang's All Here and One of Our Aircraft Is Missing, and also appeared on Broadway.

But she will be best remembered for playing Blanche in Alfred Hitchcock's 1938 thriller The Lady Vanishes, opposite Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave.

Withers was the first non-Australian to be made an Officer of the Order of Australia and she was awarded a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2002.

She married Australian actor John McCallum, who helped create the cult TV series Skippy the Bush Kangaroo.

They had three children and lived together in Sydney until McCallum's death last year.

A striking presence on stage and in the great days of British film, she played the prison governor of TV's Within These Walls

Followers of postwar cinema may well recall Googie Withers's striking presence in It Always Rains On Sunday, an unusually intense film for the Ealing Studios of 1947. A bored wife, she gives shelter to an ex-lover, now a murderer on the run, played by John McCallum, soon to be her real-life husband. The lovers were shown as unsympathetically as they might have been in French film noir, and the weather was bad even by British standards.

What Withers, who has died aged 94, brought to that performance was to define her strength in some of her most powerful roles. Too strong a face and too grand a manner prevented her being thought conventionally pretty, but she was imposingly watchable because of an obvious vigour and sexuality. Thus equipped,...

Actor husband of Googie Withers, he co-created Skippy the bush kangaroo

The ruggedly handsome Australian actor John McCallum, who has died aged 91, enhanced the golden era of postwar British cinema with his extrovert muscularity. He starred in films such as The Loves of Joanna Godden and It Always Rains On Sunday (both 1947), then returned to Australia with his wife and frequent co-star, Googie Withers, to become an impresario in theatre, film and television. His TV hits included the popular series Skippy (1966-68), developed with the producer Lee Robinson, which followed the escapades of a daredevil kangaroo which McCallum had first named Hoppy. More than 90 episodes were filmed, and the series became one of the best known Australian TV exports.

McCallum's Scottish grandparents emigrated as farmers but edged their son into the role of a church organist in Brisbane. His father moved on to concert management and built the 3,000-seat Cremorne theatre in Brisbane,...

John McCallum, the man who created cult Australian TV show Skippy, has died aged 91.

McCallum passed away on Wednesday at a nursing home in Sydney. No other details about his death were released as WENN went to press.

The Brisbane-born TV guru began his career as an actor, training in London and going on to star in numerous roles on the stage both in the U.K. and in his native Australia.

He later moved on to roles in TV and film, before stepping behind the camera to write, direct and produce.

McCallum famously created 1960s TV hit Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, which became a global success, and worked on a string of movies including 1982 war picture Attack Force Z - which gave starring roles to then-unknown actors Mel Gibson and Sam Neill.

In 1971 McCallum was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (Cbe) for his services to drama and theatre, and he was later named an Officer of the Order of Australia (Ao) in 1992.

McCallum is survived by his wife Googie and children Joanna, Nicholas and Amanda.