If you’re wondering why John Travolta has never really made a name for himself as a badass action hero, From Paris with Love should clear up any confusion pretty quickly. Running around with that d-bag goatee, in an Ed Hardy T-shirt and with a medallion purchased from a kiosk at the mall, he just rubs you the wrong way. Of course, he did a fine job playing hitman Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction so many years ago, so maybe the unending awkwardness of watching Travolta unload clips into bad guys and drop carpet F-bombs derives less from the weirdness of his casting and more from the simple fact that this is a crappy movie.

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Despite the misleading name, romantic comedies are seldom particularly funny. Most of the time, the comedy is just a benign backdrop for the romance, so a movie that aims squarely to be light entertainment never strays into overly serious territory. But When in Rome makes an honest attempt at being funny, filling out the supporting cast with actual comedians like Will Arnett, Dax Shepard, and Bobby Moynihan — you know, the way that real comedies do.

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It’s always fun to see angels fight with machine guns, right? That’s why Legion is a good movie. Not a great movie, but it delivers on what you want. Namely, angels fighting with machine guns. Of course, we also get lots of entertainingly over-the-top possessions (of children, old ladies, ice cream men, etc.), guys exploding while hanging from inverted crosses, that kind of thing. But there’s something awesome in the basic premise that supernatural beings made to work in the service of God himself are best battled not with spiritual might or geysers of holy water, but with automatic weapons.

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In the event of the apocalypse, there will be a prevalence of machetes, cannibalism, and white guys in dreadlocks and goggles. Things will be bleak, but at least you can follow Denzel Washington around as he wanders the parched landscape with floods of gravitas, occasionally engaging in awesomely staged silhouette-melees with bands of barbarian thugs.

This is the basic experience of The Book of Eli. It’s not the coolest, deepest, or most badass post-apocalyptic thriller, but it’s not terrible, and Washington’s performance goes a long way. He plays your basic man with no name, a guy who’s been traveling west on an apparent mission from God for the past 30 years — since humanity effed itself with a massive war that somehow resulted in the sun depleting the earth of all its resources and most of its people.

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When you think about it, Youth in Revolt is kind of a genius move for nerdy heartthrob Michael Cera. Clearly, playing sweet, stammering, awkwardly adorable young men is this kid’s bread and butter, and nobody can fault him for taking on those roles again and again. But, of course, he’s not going to impress anybody by playing endless variations on George Michael from Arrested Development, so what’s a boy to do? The answer is to play not one, but two roles in the 2009 comedy Youth in Revolt: the obligatory nervous-but-cute teenager Nick Twisp, and Twisp’s badass invented alter ego, Francois Dillinger.

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A romantic comedy for the empty-nest crowd, It’s Complicated isn’t the most well-written movie in the world, but its leading actors could make up for just about any shortcoming. It stars Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin as Jane and Jake, a couple who weathered a messy divorce a decade earlier, following over 20 years of marriage. Now that all their kids are college age or older, they’ve become comfortable with their new roles in each other’s lives — so much so, that they begin an illicit affair, even though Jake is remarried (to the hot but bitchy Agness, played by Lake Bell), and Jane is experiencing sparks of romance with her architect Adam (Steve Martin).

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Actress Brittany Murphy died this past weekend at the young age of 32. The Georgia native grew up in New Jersey, and began moving through the ranks of regional theater at age nine. By thirteen, she had signed with a professional manager and was appearing in TV commercials, and within the year she landed a starring role in the sitcom Drexell’s Class, marking the beginning of an acting career that would remain constant for the rest of her life.

Over the coming years, Murphy would continue to find a regular place in TV and film, though she’d be most strongly remembered for the role of ugly duckling Tai in the 1995 comedy Clueless. She earned critical acclaim for her performance in 2002’s 8 Mile, and was a beloved fixture in the voice-cast of the animated series King of the Hill from 1997 to 2009. Murphy is survived by her husband, writer/producer Simon Monjack.

Despite an impressive ensemble cast, writer/director Kirk Jones’ 2009 family drama Everybody’s Fine falls pretty flat — it’s heartbreaking during brief transitional moments where Robert De Niro is probably improving, but chintzy and fake whenever the script actually calls for real drama. Oddly enough, much of the story is likely supposed to ring false — as De Niro plays a recently widowed father traveling across the country to visit his grown children, who are each obviously omitting as-yet-unspecified info about their lives to him during his stay. The only problem is that the movie feels even phonier when the truth comes out.

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