Written by Anthony Sargon

Guillermo del Toro sure knows how to pick his projects. The grand story-teller serves as executive producer of "Mama", a horror film based on a 2008 short film of the same name. Though a little uneven, "Mama" is a consistently creepy and memorable horror fable that delivers where it counts.

An all-girl teenage rock band from Indian-administered Kashmir has decided to split after the region's top Muslim cleric declared their music to be "un-Islamic", their manager said Tuesday.

Pragaash, a three-piece group whose members are still in high school, had been the target of an online hate campaign ever since winning a "Battle of the Bands" contest in December.

Famous composer Marcel Khalife enthralled a Qatari audience with his Arab Spring-inspired suite "Oriental" in Doha, presented in collaboration with the Philharmonic Orchestra he helped set up in 2007.

The late Sunday performance aimed "to echo the cries of the Arab people for freedom," said the 62-year-old composer, whose latest work brings together tunes from the traditional Iraqi maqam musical style, mixed with others from the Levant, North Africa, Egypt and Andalusia.

Three week before the much-anticipated Oscars, U.S. film director and actor Ben Affleck won a new top prize for his film "Argo," a thriller about the rescue of American hostages in Iran.

"There was a point in my life where I was really down, really confused, I didn't know what was going to happen and I thought 'I should be a director!'. And so I did it, and I worked very hard," Affleck said late Saturday as he received the award for outstanding directorial achievement in feature film from the Directors Guild of America.

U.S. star Johnny Depp will play notorious Boston gangster Whitey Bulger in the film "Black Mass", to be directed by Barry Levinson, the producers announced Saturday.

The film recounts the fate of the godfather of Boston's underworld who became an FBI informant to get rid of a gangster rival but was eventually arrested in 2011.

The love-struck zombies of "Warm Bodies" swarmed the box office on Super Bowl weekend with a $20 million opening.

On a weekend that Hollywood largely yields to football, the PG-13 film from Lionsgate's Summit Entertainment easily led the box office, according to studio estimates Sunday. The Super Bowl always means a significant slide in movie-going on Sunday — studios predict a decrease of as much as 70 percent from Saturday to Sunday — but "Warm Bodies" still lured many teenage fans.

If naysayers still doubted Beyonce's singing talents — even after her national anthem performance this week at a press conference — the singer proved she is an exceptional performer at the Super Bowl halftime show.

Beyonce opened and closed her set belting songs, and in between she danced hard and heavy — and better than most contemporary pop stars.

Sylvester Stallone says that despite his "Rambo" image and new shoot-em-up film "Bullet to the Head," he's in favor of new national gun control legislation.

Stallone supported the 1994 "Brady bill" that included a now-expired ban on assault weapons, and hopes that ban can be reinstated.

David Beckham has won league championships in three countries on two continents, earns millions of dollars in endorsements and his name is practically synonymous with celebrity itself. He has his own cologne, for goodness sake. So why is he even bothering to sit on the bench for the Paris Saint-Germain football club?

His royal highness of football doesn't need the money — and he's said he'll donate his PSG salary to charity — but he does need to start thinking about life after the game. At 37, Beckham is practically a dinosaur for the sport, and he acknowledged in his welcoming press conference on Thursday that he probably won't be in the team's starting lineup.

The man who oversaw the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, ex-CIA director Leon Panetta, vouched Friday for "Zero Dark Thirty," calling it a "good movie" even though the tale of the biggest manhunt in history had to be simplified for the big screen.

"It's a movie," Panetta said, laughing. "And it's a good movie. But I lived the real story," he told Agence France Presse in an interview.