2 Guns
Here's Denzel Washington in action-hero mode, and Mark Wahlberg in funny-dopey sidekick mode, and Edward James Olmos deliciously slumming his way through a role as a Mexican drug kingpin named Papi, and Bill "Knuckles" Paxton showing up in a few scenes making crazy eyes. There are some cool car chases, a bunch of shooting, a bank robbery, and plenty of quipping. This is all 100 percent fine. But for a B movie that revels in being empty-headed, 2 Guns still comes up a little empty-handed. Even the title smacks of laziness, but it's the absolutely ludicrous plot that hobbles what could have been a fun, thoughtless, chewy genre exercise. NED LANNAMANN Various Theaters.

recommended 20 Feet From Stardom
A documentary that turns the spotlight away from the biggest music stars of the last 60 years and onto their backup singers. These singers—often women, mostly black—are responsible for some of the most memorable sounds of popular music. Most of us don't even know their names. 20 Feet from Stardom is fabulous for its music, interviews, and amazing concert and studio footage spanning several decades. But it's more than just eye candy for wannabe rockers and sentimental boomers; it also asks some big questions about fame, art, and giving credit where it's due. ELINOR JONES Hollywood Theatre, Living Room Theaters.

48-Hour Film Project
The best of Portland's entries from the 48-Hour Film Project, in which teams of local filmmakers had two days to create a short film. Hollywood Theatre.

recommended Adjust Your Tracking
See Film, this issue. Hollywood Theatre.

recommended Blackfish
With terrifying, nerve-wracking intensity—Blackfish might be a documentary, but it plays like a horror flick—director Gabriela Cowperthwaite examines the role of killer whales in marine parks. Using video and testimony from researchers, activists, and passionate but disillusioned former SeaWorld employees, Cowperthwaite makes a case that's impossible to reasonably ignore: Places like SeaWorld can't help but fuck whales up. And when whales get fucked up, they lash out—attacking each other and, in a shockingly large number of incidents, humans. ERIK HENRIKSEN Cinema 21.

recommended Blue Jasmine
Woody Allen has been making "the best Woody Allen movie in 20 years" for nearly 20 years. In the past decade alone, critics have gone so far as to knight Match Point, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and even the (real talk) actually totally shitty Midnight in Paris with the dubious title. It's a critical cliché as lazy as it is meaningless, and I suspect you'll be hearing it a lot in relation to Blue Jasmine, this year's innocuously titled entry into the annual Allen cannon. If you're anything like me, you'll roll your eyes and temper your expectations. So let me be the first to say this definitively: Blue Jasmine is not the best Woody Allen movie in 20 years. But it is one of the best dramas he's ever made. ZAC PENNINGTON Various Theaters.

The Butler
See review this issue. Various Theaters.

Drug War
The latest from Election director Johnnie To. Things to expect: drugs, violence, badass gangsters, and a plot that will probably be at least a little bit confusing. Hollywood Theatre.

recommended Elysium
For a generation for whom class mobility is a myth, it's easy to look at Elysium director Neill Blomkamp—who also made 2009's remarkable District 9—as the sort of filmmaker we need. He's also a difficult guy to nail down: as comfortable with guns, spaceships, and explosions as he is with political and social issues, he runs the risk of turning off both snobs ("Why'd he have to go and turn it into a dumb action movie at the end?") and idiots ("Why'd there have to be so much talking until he got to the action at the end?"). For those who can embrace both the visceral and the allegorical, though, Blomkamp seems aware of both the 21st century's overwhelming ills and the fantastical sort of catharsis we require to escape them, however briefly. Elysium deals with class mobility, health care, and immigration; it also crams in defense contractors, terrorism, police brutality, economic disparity, and ineffective governance. With each, Blomkamp trades subtlety for explosions and gore, which seems like an okay trade: Allegory is hardly required to pussyfoot around. ERIK HENRIKSEN Various Theaters.

recommended Frances Ha
Whichever way you turn the movie, it catches some light: This way, the plight of millennials; that way, the stylistic nods to French New Wave. There's a whole trend piece to be written about the young female writers (star Greta Gerwig co-wrote the script) who are changing the way women are depicted in popular entertainment, and then there's parsing how this generous, optimistic film fits into the context of writer/director Noah Baumbach's previous work. What a tremendous relief it is to find a movie that acknowledges that women are interesting—that a woman can be the protagonist in a story that doesn't end in romance or a makeover, and that all the vitality and confusion and excitement of being young can be refracted just as well through a woman as a man. ALISON HALLETT Laurelhurst Theater.

recommended Fruitvale Station
It's a few hours into New Year's Day 2009, and a transit cop stands over 22-year-old Oscar Grant and his friends in the aftermath of a fight on a commuter train. The cops are indelicate, impatient. The men struggle back. Grant, in handcuffs, is dumped onto his stomach. Suddenly, in the chaos, one of the cops fires his gun into Grant's back. The crowd wails at a needless and visceral homicide. The picture fades out. In real life, Grant's death—and the pale justice that followed, with the cop who shot him serving merely 11 months for manslaughter—sparked riots. But it's only then, when we know how Grant's story ends, that Fruitvale Station—a dramatized retelling of the day that preceded Grant's death—can finally begin. DENIS C. THERIAULT Various Theaters.

recommended Ghostbusters
See My, What a Busy Week! Academy Theater.

recommended The Hunger
1983's David Bowie vampire flick, screening as part of the NW Film Center's Top Down: Rooftop Cinema series. Hotel deLuxe.

Jobs
See review this issue. Various Theaters.

Kick-Ass 2
See review this issue. Various Theaters.

Lovelace
Juicy, horrifying, and controversial, Linda Lovelace's life—throughout which she went from prude teen, to famous (and famously abused) Deep Throat porn actress, to feminist spokesperson—is rich material for a film. But in the hands of directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, Lovelace is disappointingly simplified. MARJORIE SKINNER Living Room Theaters.

recommended Man of Steel
Zack Snyder, David S. Goyer, and Christopher Nolan have found a way to both reintroduce and celebrate a character everybody already knows; while Man of Steel isn't perfect, it's the best Superman movie yet. ERIK HENRIKSEN Various Theaters.

The Mirror
Andrei Tarkovsky's experimental drama from 1975. Also see Nostalghia, this page. Whitsell Auditorium.

recommended Mud
The latest from writer/director Jeff Nichols (Take Shelter) is a sad, sweet story about growing up and discovering that adults don't hold all the answers. If that sounds like a cliché, Mud offers a worthwhile variation that contains real feeling. NED LANNAMANN Laurelhurst Theater.

Nostalghia
The 1983 drama from revered director and horrible speller Andrei Tarkovsky. Also see The Mirror, this page. Whitsell Auditorium.

Only God Forgives
Nicolas Winding Refn's follow-up to 2011's very nearly perfect Drive is very far from perfect. If one element of Drive stuck in audiences' memories, it was its hazy, druggy atmosphere: Ryan Gosling, then a nameless driver, staring into the distance, or gazing lovingly at Carey Mulligan, when he wasn't dispensing righteous bursts of violence. In Only God Forgives, that equation has been switched; the violence takes the forefront and is usually the opposite of righteous. Going for levels of horrific gore and lurid blood that he hasn't reveled in since his Pusher trilogy, Refn zooms in, tighter and tighter, on his characters' psychological and physical mutilations. A friend I saw Only God Forgives with described the experience as "excruciating." I didn't offer a defense. ERIK HENRIKSEN Academy Theater, Laurelhurst Theater.

recommended Pacific Rim
In anyone else's hands, Pacific Rim would've been a generic blockbuster; in Guillermo del Toro's, it's something thrilling and fun and weird. ERIK HENRIKSEN Century Clackamas Town Center, Century Eastport 16.

Paranoia
See review this issue. Various Theaters.

Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters
American culture treats its children like tiny idiots—so it's almost noteworthy when a kids' movie comes along that's slightly less bogglingly inane than the norm. Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters is not good, but it's not as terrible as most of what Hollywood churns out for your children: There are only two quip-happy CG animals. A connection to history and myth is drawn, however glancingly. No one audibly farts. ALISON HALLETT Various Theaters.

Planes
Planes is more than Disney's craven attempt at a Cars knockoff. Did you know it's also the finest Dane Cook film ever made? DENIS C. THERIAULT Various Theaters.

Portland Underground Film Festival
A celebration of underground and underseen cinema, both foreign and domestic, including shorts and features. For more info and a complete schedule, see cstpdx.com. Clinton Street Theater.

recommended Prince Avalanche
Normally the presence of Paul Rudd signals a few hearty guffaws. Here, not so much. David Gordon Green's latest is a minor character study that trades in low-key desperation and knowing chuckles. It's a welcome return to his sleepy-indie roots. Rudd's Alvin is as listless as he is contemplative. Emile Hirsch is the dim-witted brother of his long-term girlfriend. The two clash and, inevitably, bond while repainting yellow lines along fire-ravaged backwoods roads in West Texas. It's a haunted, lonely landscape that yields quiet, reluctant epiphanies. It won't change your life but it will take you someplace special. JEFF MEYERS Living Room Theaters.

recommended Raiders of the Lost Ark
"Professor of archeology, expert on the occult, and... how does one say it? Obtainer of rare antiquities." Laurelhurst Theater.

Repressed Cinema
See My, What a Busy Week! Hollywood Theatre.

recommended The Room
See My, What a Busy Week! Cinema 21.

recommended Rushmore
"I'm a little bit lonely these days." Fifth Avenue Cinema.

Shyamal Uncle Turns Off the Lights
"A very particular 80-year-old retiree becomes obsessed with getting the streetlights in his Calcutta neighborhood turned off after sunrise." Ah, yes, the elderly: a powerful, admirable force for progress in modern society. Whitsell Auditorium.

Student
In this Kazakh film, "a solitary philosophy student steers his directionless life toward the commission of a violent crime." Fun! Whitsell Auditorium.

The Way, Way Back
Mainstream movies remind me of family reunions: inane dialogue, formulaic plots, and two-dimensional characters. The Way, Way Back felt so much like a family reunion that by the end, I was ready to get drunk with my cousins and forget it ever happened. ROSE FINN Century 16 Cedar Hills Crossing, Century Eastport 16, Cinemagic.

We Grew Wings
A documentary about the women's track program at the University of Oregon, directed by Eugene-based filmmakers Sarah Henderson and Erich Lyttle. Directors and producer in attendance. Whitsell Auditorium.

We're the Millers
For big-budget, mainstream comedy fare, you could do infinitely worse. And yet, you could also do so, so much better. MARJORIE SKINNER Various Theaters.

The Wolverine
DO NOT MISUNDERSTAND ME. The Wolverine is not what cinephiles with monocles will call a "good" film. It is, however a film that contains the following things: Hugh Jackman being gruff and charming, usually without a shirt! An angry silver robot! A snake lady? Prophetic mysteries. Ninjas! Samurai swords. The best bit of self-surgery since Prometheus! Honor. (Ugh, so much honor.) Beautiful Japanese ladies! BOOM! A nuclear explosion. A love hotel. Wolverine living in a cave, looking and probably smelling like a filthy hobo. More ninjas! Grumpy yakuza! A friendly grizzly bear! For real: You will get your money's worth. ERIK HENRIKSEN Various Theaters.