93% 50/50

All Critics (122) | Top Critics (40) | Fresh (113) | Rotten (9)

Still, it's Gordon-Levitt's choices that continue to impress. Sure, he owned one of the most jaw-dropping sequences in last summer's blockbuster Inception. But the actor remains drawn to profoundly human-scale hurts and quiet triumphs.

Gordon-Levitt is an agreeably undemonstrative actor who plays well opposite the burbly Rogen.

Chances are about 90/10 that you'll enjoy 50/50.

Scene by scene, 50/50 can be both amusing and moving, with the tightly wound Gordon-Levitt and the boundaryless Rogen forming an oddly complementary pair. But as a whole the movie never quite coheres.

In other hands, Adam might well be hard to take. But as the comedy in 50/50 turns darker, Gordon-Levitt, who's maybe the most natural, least affected actor of his generation, makes prickly plenty engaging.

An everyman tale with plenty of heart and honesty, the serious subject matter is regularly enlivened with jolts of genuine hilarity, some of it in delightfully questionable taste.

[The filmmakers] tap into the wonderful complexity of the material: Cancer is awful, but it's instructive and loving and funny, too.

Not the comedy I expected but instead a well acted but depressing film.

Cancer patient questions his life in mature dramedy.

50/50 keeps the highs high. That's easy. Keeping the lows high is much more tricky. The lows are where most dying-of-a-disease movies go to die.

Funny, heartfelt, well-acted and refreshingly honest. It's one of the best movies of the year.

Amazingly upbeat and comical despite realistically depicting what it's like to know you have only a 50/50 chance of surviving a rare cancer.

As Adam in 50/50, Gordon-Levitt is low-key, but very human. His expressive face shines and darkens. Director Jonathan Levine brings him back to simple, expressive humanity.

'50/50' plays cancer for laughs.

50/50 centers around a cancerous presence, and that refers to Seth Rogen as much as it does to the malignant tumor found on the spine of Adam (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). Carve Rogen out of the picture, and its chances of being a truly moving film increase.

Emotionally cathartic serio-comedy, ending on a convincingly upbeat note.

A good cancer movie should make you both laugh and cry, and 50/50 did exactly that for me.

If you are open to the experience of a 'Cancer Movie,' this is a pretty good one. It's funny where it should be funny, dramatic where it should be dramatic. It doesn't try too hard to wring the tears out of you. (Movie Review for Parents also available)

50/50 isn?t interested in defeatism, except as one inevitable way station of the film?s appealing emotional ramble.

If you want to draw some life lessons from it all, go ahead: That's your choice, and it's easy to do. But '50/50' isn't going to beat you about the head with it.

Mixing humor and painful subject matter is, naturally, very difficult. The beauty of this movie is that it does so with ease.

Emotional without being cloying, honest and funny and low key.

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Source: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/5050_2011/

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