The buddy movie, a formula that thrives on novelty, conquers fresh terrain in this emotional comedy about a sweet 27-year-old guy named Adam (Joseph-Gordon Levitt) who discovers he has a large and rare cancer on his spine. His bad-beside-manner doctor places Adam’s odds of survival at about . . . well, the title gives that much away. Seth Rogen is his inimitable self as the best friend, coaching Adam through the ordeal with a raw candour, a profane sense of humour, a vicarious desire to get him laid—exploiting the C-card after Adam’s girlfriend quickly proves to be an unsympathetic bitch. Insofar as 5o/50 is a romantic comedy, not just a cancer comedy, Anna Kendrick (Up in the Air) provides the spark. As his therapist, a rookie who hasn’t yet learned how to draw boundaries, she makes for a cutely inappropriate love interest. Although the buddy rituals of 50/50 are familiar, I can’t think of a comedy that has explored cancer in such clinical detail, and much of the humour is about the ineptitude of friends and family in knowing how to behave—Angelica Huston is priceless as the mother who manages to make her trauma more dramatic than her son’s. The laughing and crying balance out fairly evenly at 50/50, with lots of medicinal pot easing the pain. As Rogen might say, this is one cancer movie that’s not a bummer.