End of Watch (2012)

Pretty darn good, this veers wildly yet successfully between being a goofy buddy picture and a violent cop drama starring Jake Gyllenhaal (last in these pages in Source Code) and Michael Peña (covered in The Lincoln Lawyer, then in Everything Must Go, 30 Minutes or Less, and Tower Heist). There are some bloody images that will stay with you. Directed and written by David Ayer (wrote Training Day (2001), wrote and directed others I haven't seen), it pulls us in to the close relationship between these colleagues and the others in their lives, including Anna Kendrick (most recently in Pitch Perfect).

I wanted to flesh out the "placeholder" I wrote for this movie (we saw it October 18) because it's been nominated for a Critics Choice Best Actor Award for Gyllenhaal, and they will be handed out this Thursday evening. The National Board of Review has put this on its list of Top Ten Independent Films for the year and it has two nominations from the Independent Spirit Awards: Peña for Supporting Male and Roman Vasyanov (new to me) for Cinematography. The latter nomination is ironic to me because it's a serious MPMS (motion picture motion sickness) inducer, partly due to a subplot of Gyllenhaal's character documenting his life with a hand-held camera. Apparently I was warned but didn't look at my notes before we picked something to see while we were out of town back then.

Its expected DVD release is January 22 and with rottentomatoes' critics averaging 85 and audiences 88, you might want to put it in your queue if you don't mind violence and its dubious distinction of being sixth in the all time profanity list, with 326 instances of the F word in 109 minutes.