November
11 When good stars find bad movies: Life at the AFM

So the American Film Market is all but over and, well, not much happened. However, one AFM element  remains constant as the polluted tides just outside the Loews Santa Monica Hotel: It's well suited for discovering who's on the way down as well as who might be on the way up. (Thanks to Shock Till You Drop for the links.)

• Val Kilmer stars in "The Steam Experiment," in which he portrays a "former university professor who overheats his hostages to prove that humans will devolve into chaos under the pressures of global warming."


• Brittany Murphy ("Girl Interrupted") and Thora Birch ("American Beauty") star in "Deadline," in which Murphy portrays "a screenwriter who travels to an abandoned house to finish a script on time, but a series of strange events lead her to a psychological breakdown."


• Agnes Bruckner ("24") and Taryn Manning ("Hustle & Flow") star in "Killers" (aka "Kill Theory" aka "Last Resort"). Despite the title changes, the plot remains the same: A group of college grads at a vacation house must kill each other by sunrise to survive a madman's game.


• "The Devil's Tomb" stars Cuba Gooding, Jr. and was directed by Jason Connery. It's a thriller  about mercenaries hired to rescue a scientist in the Middle East.


• Teri Polo ("Meet The Parents") stars in "Two: Thirteen," in which a police officer returns from psychiatric leave "only to discover that he is caught up in a serial killer's rampage."