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Monday’s super-sized Teen Wolf season finale sent Scott’s pack on the most hectic south-of-the-border adventure since Beverly Hills Chihuahua 2.

Related Teen Wolf‘s Ryan Kelley on Parrish’s Secret, Future With Lydia In Season 5

After sifting through Scott’s dirty man-panties — thanks, Stiles! — the gang tracked his musk all the way to the Temple of Tezcatlipoca (which I totally spelled right, according to Wikipedia). There were a few bumps along the way, like Liam going bananas and almost eating Stiles, but they eventually made it in one piece.

Of course, getting to Mexico was only half the battle.

British producers of animation forced to go abroad due to 'lack' of homegrown talent with traditional figurative skills

First it was Polish plumbers, now it is Polish artists. In a damning indictment of Britain's art schools, two Oscar-winning British film-makers have recruited 60 Polish painters to work on their latest animation because they claim they could not find artists here with the right skills.

Loving Vincent tells the story of Vincent van Gogh through moving images of his masterpieces. Hugh Welchman and David Parfitt, its producers, hoped to hire British artists to recreate more than 1,000 of the painter's works, but say they were unable to find sufficient homegrown talent.

Welchman, who won an Oscar in 2008 for his animation of Peter and the Wolf, said British art schools, unlike Polish ones, did not train students to acquire figurative skills and pushed them instead towards conceptual art. He said that few British artists had been up to scratch,...

This could be the most ingenious mix of animation and the documentary style since Nick Park’s Creature Comforts. Is it technically a documentary? I don’t know, but I’m calling it one for now. “Mockumentary” doesn’t seem to fit, and anyway the film will be dealing with a genuine investigation into the circumstances of Vincent Van Gogh‘s death. The expert talking heads here are from long ago. They are the people whose portraits were famously painted by the artist (including Postman Joseph Roulin and Adeline Ravoux), and their testimonial dialogue is based on actual letters and diaries and other artifacts telling of what they knew of him, much of which comes from his own words. There is likely some fictionalizing involved, but that’s fine. Docs aren’t always fact-exclusive. Loving Vincent is like time travel by cinema, and I’m certain it’s going to be an incredible trip. From...

Happy 70th birthday to the legendary singer/songwriter/painter/soul of Saskatoon/Parisian free man Joni Mitchell. Props to the woman for years of candor about the music business and her own restless musical evolution. When both Charles Mingus and Prince care to toast your work, you might be awesome.

In the age of The Kids Are All Right, emotional Joni Mitchell covers may seem a tad trite, but let me remind you: The woman’s songs are unbelievable, and it’s often wonderful to hear him them sung and reinterpreted by other artists. It can also be a jarring experience as you’ll hear with a couple of entries on this list, but let’s explore: 10 Joni Mitchell covers worth hearing.

1. Diana Krall, “A Case of You”

Well, that’s awesome. Mrs. Elvis Costello is still on her feet (or sitting on that piano bench?) after a remarkable version...

Programme for May's three-week arts celebration – released today – will feature Emil and the Detectives, Judith Kerr and Michael Rosen's orchestral work for kids, The Great Enormo

Emil and the Detectives – Erich Kästner's 1929 classic story about a boy who enlists the help of friends to foil a bank robber – is the book at the heart of this year's Brighton festival, which is guest-directed by author, broadcaster and former children's laureate Michael Rosen.

Rosen, who was read the book in weekly instalments by his class teacher when he was nine – and who remembers elaborating and acting out episodes of it with his friends – said the book was "very special in a variety of ways. It was the first of its kind: the first book in which children are detectives and solve a crime. And it was completely new in its attitude to the city. There's a tradition in literature of...

Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained is morally comfortable; everyone is a victim or monster. But what I'd really like to see is Spike Lee's Lincoln

Quentin Tarantino may take the low road (trashy vitality, pastiche of already disreputable genres) and Steven Spielberg the high road – moral seriousness, historical scruple – but they have both arrived in the same territory this year, the subject of slavery in American history. Is the national shame better staged in good taste or bad, as solemn struggle or sanguinary panto? Perhaps taste is a misleading consideration, unimportant compared with a shared tendency to make things easy for an audience.

At the beginning of Django Unchained, the recaptured runaway slave Django (Jamie Foxx) is freed by the German Dr King Schultz, for selfish reasons. Schultz (Christoph Waltz) is a bounty hunter in need of help identifying three lucrative targets, and Django knows them. Two hours of screen time later,...

Die Hard | The Nutcracker | Ghosts Of Christmas Special Past | Madcap Christmas | The Snowman/Peter & The Wolf | The Wizard Of Oz | Guilty Pleasures Christmas Cinema Party | Enchanted Pictures | Experience Cinema

Christmas tradition now dictates that every cinema in the land must screen It's A Wonderful Life, every year, forever after. Sure it's a great movie but, just as Jimmy Stewart is invited to imagine the world without him, perhaps we can imagine festive moviegoing without Frank Capra's well-worn perennial? Here's a glimpse of that alternative reality.

In cinemas across the UK, familiar staples of Christmas programming are sprinkled around the schedules, with old chestnuts (such as White Christmas and Miracle On 34th Street) and newer classics (Gremlins and The Muppet Christmas Carol). But it's Bruce Willis's incidentally Christmassy Die Hard that's emerging as the new seasonal favourite. London's Prince Charles (WC2) goes the extra distance with a back-to-back Die Hard trilogy tomorrow,...

When it comes to film scoring, size definitely does matter. The trend in big-budget Hollywood films has been toward a bigger and bigger sound—enormous string and brass sections and 20-person percussion ensembles, all backed by massive beds of synths and samples. But often, especially with indie projects, what’s required is a much smaller, more intimate sound. Even a modestly sized orchestra might be far too large for a quiet drama about a family, a couple or a child.

It’s important for a film composer to know how to match what’s happening onscreen not just musically, but also in terms of size, feel and scope. Scoring The Avengers with just acoustic guitar and flute would clearly be wrong, just as using the orchestra from Pirates of the Carribean to score Juno would have also been a mistake. In this set of posts I’ll explore various ways...

Everett A scene from “Rhapsody in Blue,” 1945.

Some sounds come at you through your innards before they reach your ears. Like the subway rumble half felt underfoot on a Manhattan street, certain instruments announce themselves first as a physical sensation: a low timpani roll, a pulsating tuba beat, a quiet sustained tremolo note in the double basses.

On April 1, Yale in New York, an innovative concert series curated by clarinetist David Shifrin, celebrates the multi-faceted repertoire of works written for low instruments.

Note: Do not read on if you have not seen Season 1, Episode 15 of ABC's "Once Upon a Time," entitled "Red Handed."

One of these days, I'm sure I'll start taking the "Once Upon a Time" writers' creativity for granted, but thankfully, the show is still fresh enough that every new twist seems to come out of left field. Though the series has already tackled a number of iconic characters in unique ways, the way Jane Espenson turned Red Riding Hood's tale on its head was perhaps the biggest surprise yet in terms of characterization; a welcome surprise, considering how many shows often telegraph their shocks and talk down to their audience.

I spent most of the episode predicting that Granny would be the murderous wolf plaguing the village, especially after we found out that she had been bitten as a child; but I was thrilled that the show chose...

Scene from “Once Upon a Time.”

The show is mostly about Ruby/Red this week, but Kathryn’s disappearance is still on the table too.

Ruby (aka Red) is intrigued by the mysterious stranger and how he drifts around, including to Nepal. Granny calls her over, which annoys her.

In Fairy Tale, Little Red gives a hunter (his name, we’ll learn, is Peter—Peter and the Wolf Peter?) a kiss, after he teasingly threatens to huff and puff and blow the house down.

Rome — Lucio Dalla, an Italian singer-songwriter who sold millions of records worldwide, died Thursday in Switzerland during a European concert tour, his management company said.

Dalla, 68, apparently died of a heart attack in a Montreux hotel after eating breakfast, according to Ph.D srl Music Management, which is based in his native city of Bologna, Italy.

Dallas, whose musical genres ranged from folk to jazz to classical, gave a concert Wednesday in the Swiss city known for its music and "was in fine form," said Pascal Pellegrino, the director of Montreux's "culture season." Pellegrino said the performance was warmly applauded and Dalla stayed on to chat with fans.

Dalla's haunting melody "Caruso" sold 9 million copies worldwide and was sung by the late opera great Luciano Pavarotti with Dalla at a 1992 concert in Modena.

Dalla toured abroad frequently, including in the United States, sometimes with another famed Italian folksong writer, Francesco De Gregori.

With the 2012 Grammy Awards upon us and everyone already thrilled for the big Beach Boys / Foster The People / Maroon 5 reunion (finally!), let’s take a second to remind ourselves of something we all already know and complain about every year: The Grammys are, without a doubt, the weirdest and most arbitrary awards show in the entire entertainment world. To re-prove this time-tested theory, we’ve scoured Grammy’s checkered past and compiled some of its most bizarre winners in a desperate search of some meaning for this odd gramophonic statue. From the awesomely-random to the just flat-out terrible, here’s a list of 13 People You Can’t Believe Won A Grammy: 1. Zach Braff Without rehashing the internet’s eminent disdain for Garden State, let’s just take a moment to acknowledge that an actual physical golden gramophone was given to Zach Braff for being the “compilation producer” of the...

The 6-2 U.S. Supreme Court decision favors content owners including Hollywood studios over an unusual coalition of public interest and Internet activists including Google. At issue was whether the federal government had the right in 1994 to pass a law that extended copyright protection to works that were already in the public domain. Lawmakers acted to sync U.S. copyright law with other countries’ rules as part of a broad trade agreement known as the Uruguay Round. But the change meant that public groups lost access to works including Alfred Hitchcock’s 1932 film Number Seventeen, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” — and about 1 million books that Google said it wanted to make available online. Those challenging the change said that the government had trampled on the First Amendment without a compelling reason. But the Supreme Court justices deferred to Congress’ right to decide the national interest.

Just days before the release of "Tangled," Disney shocked the world by announcing the film would be their last fairy tale princess story. But while there was much wailing, another, more positive milestone has been somewhat overlooked: "Tangled" marked the studio's 50th animated feature.

We know what you're thinking: Surely Disney has made more than 50 movies, right? And it's true, they have. But if there's one thing Disney knows even more than animation, it's how to protect their brand, which is why they've designated some of their features to be official classics and others -- like "The Jungle Book 2" or "Pete's Dragon" -- to be, you know, just something they do on the side for giggles and grins.

To celebrate the release of "Beauty and the Beast 3D," we review and rank all 50 official Disney animated features. Let the subjectivity begin.

50. 'Brother Bear' (2003)

Hey guys, remember "Brother Bear,...

Originally published in the Guardian on 16 December 1966

New York, December 15

Walt Disney, the Pied Piper of Hollywood, who made a mountain of money out of a mouse, died today in Burbank, California at the age of 65. There was very little in the early life of Walter Elias Disney to show that he would emerge by his twenty-fifth birthday as the most revolutionary motion picture talent after Chaplin. The vital statistics, padded out from newspaper files, suggest a boyhood as corny as Kansas in August.

A Midwestern upbringing, the son of a carpenter who tried his hand at farming (so as to introduce the young Walt to a menagerie of adorable animals), a full stretch of grade school, an incomplete spell in high school, a boy of little scholarship and lively appetite for games who picked up pin-money in winter as a newspaper delivery boy, in summer as a candy butcher...

Blu-ray Review

Red Riding Hood

Directed by: Catherine Hardwicke

Cast: Amanda Seyfried, Shiloh Fernandez, Gary Oldman, Billy Burke

Running Time: 1 hr 40 mins

Rating: PG-13

Due Out: June 14, 2011

Plot: There is a werewolf in a medieval village that is haunting everyone, especially Valerie (Seyfried). Valerie is also caught in a love triangle.

Who’S It For? If you saw “love triangle” in the plot and thought Sold, then you can make it through this movie just fine. For everyone else, I’m not sure what you are doing sitting through this film.

Movie:

The first ten minutes are so vital to a film. They let you know who to care about, what world we’re in, and hopefully, they’ve hooked you in for more. The first ten minutes of Red Riding Hooding are a perfect indication of what we’re in store for, but that’s not a compliment.

We...

This isn’t a fairy tale for children, even if it feels and seems vaguely familiar. This is delectable fodder for anyone who likes angsty and complicated young adult love stories with an ever appealing supernatural element. It’s Catherine Hardwicke in her comfort zone giving us a dark and edgy fantasy with sexy stars and a rocking soundtrack, a mystical creature of myth in the neighborhood, and an adolescent love triangle.

The film’s origins are based upon the near ancient legend of a wolf and a little girl dressed in red, a tale that has been told since medieval times and has gone through more than one incarnation and varying adaptations. This is a 700 year old fable revisited and given a few clever twists that proves the lure of the werewolf is as tantalizing as ever.

The Set Up

The isolated, picturesque and archaic storybook mountain village of Daggerhorn has a problem.

Red Riding Hood

Directed by: Catherine Hardwicke

Cast: Amanda Seyfried, Shiloh Fernandez, Gary Oldman, Billy Burke

Running Time: 1 hr 40 mins

Rating: PG-13

Release Date: March 11, 2011

Plot: There is a werewolf in a medieval village that is haunting everyone, especially Valerie (Seyfried). Valerie is also caught in a love triangle.

Who’S It For? If you saw “love triangle” in the plot and thought Sold, then you can make it through this movie just fine. For everyone else, I’m not sure what you are doing sitting through this film.

Overall

The first ten minutes are so vital to a film. They let you know who to care about, what world we’re in, and hopefully, they’ve hooked you in for more. The first ten minutes of Red Riding Hooding are a perfect indication of what we’re in store for, but that’s not a compliment.

We’re given...

Pulp singer delights his young audience at Royal Festival Hall with his narration of the Russian composer's children's story

Being asked to narrate Peter and the Wolf is like being cast as Lear: the ultimate sign you have pricked a certain layer of the nation's consciousness. David Bowie has done it. So has Peter Ustinov. Ditto Patrick Stewart, Ben Kingsley and David Attenborough. It was only a matter of time, then, before Jarvis Cocker was given the honour.

Like those that have gone before him, the Pulp singer is the owner of a voice you'd recognise underwater, a deep and warm tenor with vowels as flat as his native Sheffield is hilly.

"Hello everyone. I'm Jarvis," he said with a salute, as he strode on to the stage at London's Royal Festival Hall. The introduction was not superfluous. While Cocker will be remembered by anyone over 30 after his bottom sabotaged...