At first glance Covert Affairs appears to be USA Network’s attempt at making a sort of Alias light.  It’s about a young, pretty female CIA agent after all.  And all the commercials show her running around in all sorts of spy scenarios.  But alas there’s no Rambaldi artifacts, no spy daddy, not even an agency pretending to be the CIA that really isn’t here.  Nope Covert Affairs stands on its own and fits extremely well into USA’s already pretty strong lineup of original shows.

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Killers is the story of a woman (Heigl) who meets a man (Kutcher) on vacation in Nice and they fall in love.  But the man is really a CIA assassin.  Cut to several years later and the pair are happily married and living a suburban life.  Until Kutcher’s old boss contacts him and the neighbors start trying to kill them.  It was written by Bob DeRosa (The Air I Breathe) & Ted Griffin (Rumor Has It) and directed by Robert Luketic (The Ugly Truth, 21).

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The Sorcerers Apprentice is a new Disney released film from producer Jerry Bruckheimer.  It’s loosely based on the bit in Fantasia, and I do mean loosely.  There is one misplaced scene with dancing mops.  Anyway, it’s directed by Jon Turteltaub (National Treasure 2, While You Were Sleeping) and is about a kid who gets sucked into a war between sorcerers going back thousands of years.  It stars Jay Baruchel (Undeclared, Tropic Thunder), Nicolas Cage (The Rock, National Treasure), and Alfred Molina (Spiderman 2, Magnolia).

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The Losers is an action film directed by Sylvain White (Stomp The Yard) and written by Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights) & James Vanderbilt (The Rundown).  It’s based on the DC comic of the same name by Andy Diggle.  The plot revolves around a black ops team who is backstabbed by a mysterious CIA figure and left for dead, while at the same time 25 children are murdered.  Soon they are contacted by a strange woman who has information about the person who betrayed them and will help them get back at him.

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Iron Man 2 is of course the sequel to Iron Man.  It stars Robert Downey Jr. as the titular Marvel comics hero who also goes by Tony Stark, eccentric billionaire and head of a leading tech company.  It’s directed by Jon Favreau (Iron Man, Elf) and written by Justin Theroux (Tropic Thunder).  This time around we find Stark dealing with his own mortality and how that relates to the past as well as dealing with the US government and enemies he never knew he even had.

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Kick-Ass is a genre-bending film based on the comic by Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.  It’s directed by Matthew Vaughn and written by Vaughn and his writing partner Jane Goldman.  The plot is at it’s very root about a typical comic book fan (Aaron Johnson) who wonders why no one has ever tried being a super hero.  So he decides he’ll try.  While out trying to impress the girl of his dreams who thinks he’s gay (Lyndsy Fonseca) he discovers there’s already a pair of people who are running around like heroes,  Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) and Hit Girl (Chloë Moretz).  Kick Ass becomes well known due to some camera phone footage, but maybe being a super hero isn’t such a great gig.

One of the great things here is that this is actually an independent film.  No studio would touch this script so Vaughn raised the money and made it himself.  That means he was creatively unencumbered by the studio system, allowing him to be as violent and have a little girl curse as much as he wanted.  Ultimately he sold the movie to Universal for more that he’d originally asked from them to budget the film.  The other great thing is that the movie and the comic were written together.  Mark Millar came up with the idea for the comic and told Vaughn about it.  So the comic and movie sides each worked together and shared ideas.

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Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief is a new film from director Chris Columbus (first 2 Harry Potter movies, RENT, Adventures In Babysitting) and writer Craig Titley (Cheaper by the Dozen) based on the bookby Rick Riordan. It is the first part of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series.

The film is about a teenager who discovers he is the son of the Greek god Poseidon and that he himself is half-god.  His entire life is changed by this discovery, also Zeus’ lightning bolt has been stolen and Zeus thinks Percy is to blame.  If the bolt is not recovered in a few days the gods will all go to war and it will change everyone’s life as they know it.  He’s brought to a camp for demi-gods and sets out to find his mother, who has been taken by Hades, and clear his name.  He’s joined by his protector (Brandon T. Jackson) and Athena’s daughter Annabeth (Alexandra Daddario).  Along the way to the underworld they run into some other Greek figures like Medusa.

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Infestation is a horror/action movie from writer/director Kevin Rankin (who wrote such gems as Reindeer Games).  It’s about a group of survivors who awake after something happens and giant bugs take over the world.  The main character is a slacker played by Chris Marquette, who has been in a ton of stuff but you might know as Adam from “Joan of Arcadia”.  His love interest is played by Brooke Nevin, who IMDb tells me has been in a ton of tv shows but I didn’t recognize her.  The band of survivors decide to head off away from a swarm of the insects and in the process visit some family along the way.

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Surrogates is a sci-fi action movie with elements of a detective movie all wrapped in an allegory about how we as a society are too connected to society.  The basic plot without spoiling anything is this: robotics and computers became so advanced that people could buy surrogates of themselves, basically robots that would be under their control and could be customized to look however they wanted.  The reasoning behind this is that you would be safe in your home and wouldn’t have to interact with the world and could avoid things like disease and if your surrogate got killed you could just buy a new one.  You’re safe at home in your pod.  So most of the things walking around now are surrogates and only a small group of cult like humans who don’t believe in robots have holed themselves up in reservations.

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