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Lyon, France – Since its launch in 2015, Talking Pictures TV has become the fastest-growing independent channel in the U.K. with a growing library of British film and TV titles that span five decades, according to founder Noel Cronin.

Noel Cronin attended the Lumière Festival’s International Classic Film Market (Mifc) in Lyon, France, where he took part in a roundtable discussion on distribution of heritage cinema.

His 24-hour channel offers feature films and TV series from the 1930s to the 1980s, reaching some 850,000 viewers a day and 2.6 million a week. Talking Pictures TV is available in the U.K. on the Sky digital satellite platform, Freeview and other satellite outlets.

Talking Pictures TV grew out of Cronin’s DVD distribution company, Renown Pictures.

“We acquired several old libraries – mostly B-features, but good ones,” Cronin explains. “We started to release them on DVD and they sold quite well. … We felt there...

Welcome back to the Weekend Warrior, your weekly look at the new movies hitting theaters this weekend, as well as other cool events and things to check out.

Three New Movies May Have Trouble Making Much of a Mark

After a couple impressive March weekends with one new box office record, and a couple impressive openings, we’re now into April, and of the new movies, there just doesn’t seem like anything can defeat last week’s powerful duo of DreamWorks Animation’s The Boss Baby--which exceeded all predictions with $49 million, taking the top spot from Beauty and the Beast. Ghost in the Shell didn’t even do as well as I thought it may, opening with just $19 million, those late reviews helping to kill its weekend.

Sony Pictures Animation are giving the loveable blue Smurfs a third go at American audiences with The Smurfs: The Lost Village (Sony), after two previous movies,...

StudioCanal UK has released the brand new (and shiny) trailer for the restoration of David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive.” Last August, the BBC conducted a poll of more than 177 film critics around the world to determine which were the best films of the 21st century, and Lynch’s iconic 2001 film topped the list. Now, 16 years after its premiere, the mystery/thriller has gotten a 4K restoration under the supervision of Lynch himself, and it’s ready to hit UK theaters.

Read More: David Lynch Revisited: Why We Need His Genius Now More Than Ever — Critics Debate

The surrealistic film follows a woman (Laura Harring) who becomes amnesic after a car accident on Los Angeles’ Mulholland Drive and an aspiring actress (Naomi Watts). The two embark on a search for clues throughout the city, where dreams and reality intertwine.

Read More: David Lynch and Kyle MacLachlan Start the ‘Twin Peaks’ Reunion...

Get ready, John Schlesinger fans, as the filmmaker’s debut feature “A Kind of Loving” has gotten the full restoration treatment, and will next be screened following Film Forum’s Brit New Wave festival, which aims to spotlight British films of the 1960’s. Though not an official part of the festival, it’s a canny topper to the ambitious slate.

Alan Bates, in his first starring role, along with June Ritchie and Thora Hird star in this classic romantic drama that took place just before the Beatles revolution. Vic and Ingrid have a shotgun civil wedding when she becomes pregnant after their one-night stand (because he was too embarrassed to buy condoms from a woman at the drugstore, what a time!) and move in with Ingrid’s vengeful, disapproving mother.

Read More: Brit New Wave Classics ‘A Hard Day’s Night,’ ‘Alfie’ and More Get Swinging at New Festival — Watch...

Shot and set in Manchester in 1962, A Kind of Loving was one of the seminal kitchen sink dramas of post-war British cinema. Made before Darling and Billy Liar, the film stars Alan Bates as a young draftsman in pursuit of fellow factory worker June Ritchie, making her screen debut. In this exclusive clip, he pursues her on the bus trip back home

• The restored print of A Kind of Loving screens as part of the Cinema Rediscovered season at Watershed, Bristol on July 29 and is released on DVD and Blu-ray on 1 August

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Writer whose novels signalled a sea-change in British literature

Stan Barstow, who has died aged 83, belonged to a generation of working-class writers who became famous in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Like his peers Alan Sillitoe, John Braine, David Storey and Keith Waterhouse, he was born in the depression years of the interwar period and flowered as a novelist in the booming welfare state of postwar Britain. Barstow and his fellow, primarily northern, writers were products of this remarkable transformation in the social landscape of Britain, and their creativity was fuelled by the opportunities and anxieties that such an enormous process of change inevitably generated.

Barstow arrived on the literary scene in 1960 with his first published novel, A Kind of Loving. An unsentimental and unpatronising portrayal of an unhappy marriage, it struck a new note of sombre and sensitive realism. He was riding the crest of a wave: Braine's...