Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Seth Rogen in 50/5050/50

Director Jonathan Levine's 50/50 casts Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a young man afflicted with a rare form of spinal cancer, and Seth Rogen as his loud, loutish, perpetually stoned best friend. Consequently, I expected the film's title and my chances of actually enjoying the movie to be one and the same. It's always great seeing Gordon-Levitt onscreen, but is there anyone left who isn't longing for a break from Rogen's braying, one-note shtick, even if, as he is here, the man isn't just presumably but damn near literally playing himself? (50/50's script is loosely autobiographical, and Rogen and author Will Reiser are real-life pals and frequent writing partners.)

Aaron Eckhart in Battle: Los AngelesBATTLE: LOS ANGELES

My number-one, hands-down, love-it-to-death favorite scene in the science-fiction action spectacle Battle: Los Angeles occurs roughly 40 minutes into the film. Hundreds of meteors have fallen to earth in urban centers around the globe, and are revealed to be teeming with aliens, who waste no time in annihilating everything and everyone in their paths. After engaging in long sequences of L.A.-based retaliation, a stalwart band of Marines is helicoptered into Santa Monica to fend off one of these attacks, and a frightened lieutenant ducks into in an apartment complex's laundry room, where he watches the horrific destruction through a window. Suddenly hearing a noise behind him, the man whips around, expecting to come face-to-face with one of the monstrous invaders from another world. Yet instead of terror, the lieutenant's face quickly registers relief, as the sound he heard was just that of the washing machine's spin cycle.

You know what that means, right? That in the midst of this apocalyptic showdown that, as we've witnessed on TV newscasts, has been going on for several hours now, someone in that apartment complex decided it was a good time to throw in a load of laundry.