RAVE - End of Watch

If you like your cop movies hard and funny, violent and warm, tender yet brutal, this one's for you.

Brian Taylor (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Mike Zavata (Michael Peña) are police officers, partners in a Los Angeles squad car.

Most of the film is taken up with watching the pair handle the daily grind - driving around South Central looking for trouble. Eventually, that trouble gets out of hand, as they pull over and arrest a Latino carrying some fancy handguns and "Liberace's AK47" - a gold-lacquered assault rifle. In the guy's truck they find a stash of money and drugs, two of the "food groups" along with guns, for which the cops are always on the lookout.

It turns out our pair have arrested their way into a drug cartel, thereby upping the stakes for everyone involved.

After the long - at first it feels overly long - scene setting, the film explodes into a series of deadlier and deadlier discoveries, encounters, and violence, where the cops are caught between the drug dealing, racial and territorial fighting among the denizens of South Central.

"From the writer of Training Day" goes the ad for this movie. Maybe it's not quite up to the high mark set by that story, but it's a cracking film nonetheless.