As one of the most bankable stars on the planet, Johnny Depp has the luxury of keeping his PR obligations brief. But he was jumping through press hoops this week as he made his first trip to China to sell moviegoers on his new sci-fi film, "Transcendence," which opens here April 18.

A severed hand travels down a conveyor belt in a coal plant -- the pale, smooth skin of the hand half buried in shards of black coal. This macabre yet visually arresting scene sets the tone for "Black Coal, Thin Ice," a Chinese arthouse thriller that has achieved the miraculous triple whammy of winning over critics, captivating audiences, and pleasing the notorious Film Bureau censorship panel.

The world has a new epidemic on its hand: drug-resistant tuberculosis. We're not talking about the kind of TB that doctors can cure with a few weeks of standard antibiotics. This disease is way more dangerous. It outwits the best medicines we have against it and costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to kill in a single person. Drug-resistant TB is on the rise around the world. And it's even cropping up here in the United States.

Monzer Darwish is a 23-year-old graphic designer and metal fan from Al Salamiyah, Syria, a district near Homs. For the last five months he’s been travelling around the country and visiting refugees in Lebanon for a documentary he’s making about underground metal bands in war-torn Syria. Needless to say, it's a tough gig.

Three Arab countries have banned the Hollywood film "Noah" on religious grounds even before its worldwide premiere and several others are expected to follow suit, a representative of Paramount Pictures told Reuters on Saturday.

Roughly half of Venezuela's TV audience was not able to watch supporting actor winner Jared Leto express solidarity with all the "dreamers" in Ukraine and Venezuela as he accepted his Oscar. That's because the private channel Venevision, for the first time in several decades of carrying the Academy Awards, did not broadcast the show Sunday night.