The Sundance Film Festival is in full swing this week, churning out buzz and hype for some of the films that mainstream audiences will hopefully not just be seeing later this year but celebrating with the same sort of passion and intensity that drove 2012 alum Beasts of the Southern Wild to multiple Academy Award nominations.

Only one of this week’s Blu-ray releases first appeared at Sundance, the wonderful documentary Searching For Sugar Man, but its release is a welcome reminder that films come in all sizes, and satisfy just the same, even without multimillion-dollar budgets or A-list movie stars.

Meanwhile, this week’s Buzz on Blu features a handful of films with some of those stars in smaller, more substantial roles, alongside releases that start their journey on home video en route to moviegoers’ hearts.

Death Race 3: Inferno (Universal Studios Home Entertainment)

The One-Liner: After Death Race 2 proved to be a pretty terrific follow-up to Paul W.S. Anderson’s remake, Luke Goss, Danny Trejo and Fred Koehler return for another adventure, this time set in South Africa, where Frankenstein is forced to do battle with an all-new slate of adversaries.

Picture Perfect? Shot digitally with director Roel Reine behind many of the cameras himself, the film looks terrific, and needs no adjustment on its journey to the smaller screen, offering a stylish, saturated visual landscape that lives up to anything theatrical.

What Else Is There? Several featurettes explore the South African locations and the shooting style of Reine, while the actors offer insights on how smartly they continue to explore their characters – even when they’re just holding on for dear life behind the wheel.

How Badly Do I Want It? As a threequel, your enjoyment may be mostly reliant on how familiar you are with the first two films, but it’s a worthy rental at the very least as it offers plenty of visceral thrills and some solid performances.

End of Watch (Universal Studios Home Entertainment)

The One-Liner: Jake Gyllenhaal takes a break from blockbusters and star vehicles for this gritty cop drama, co-starring Michael Pena.

Picture Perfect: Shot using a lot of handheld cameras in a found-footage style, the film exudes a sort of scruffy, improvised feel, which looks good on the small screen.

What Else Is There? Featurettes explore the creation of the world within the film, but David Ayer’s commentary track is the most revelatory, explaining how he constructed the film, and how he excluded as many clichés or contradictory ideas as possible.

How Badly Do I Want It? Another film worth renting, End of Watch made a lot of best-of lists for 2012, but it may not be one you’ll want or need to revisit often.

The Paperboy (Millenium Media)

The One-Liner: Lee Daniels’ follow-up to Precious is a sprawling decadent tale of sex and betrayal, featuring performances by John Cusack, Zac Efron, and an Oscar-nominated Nicole Kidman among others.

Picture Perfect? A solid transfer maintains Daniels’ oversaturated cinematography, giving the whole film an appropriately sweaty, decadent look.

What Else Is There? A featurette, interview with Daniels and behind-the-scenes materials explores how the filmmaker recruited so many talented people.

How Badly Do I Want It? An over the top, melodramatic little thriller, this movie certainly isn’t for everyone, but it’s worth watching at least once, if only to gawk in disbelief.

Searching For Sugar Man (Sony Pictures Home Entertainment)

The One-Liner: Malik Bendjelloul’s documentary follows a trail of breadcrumbs all the way to South Africa – and back — for this story of a failed ‘70s musician whose work is long overdue for rediscovery.

Picture Perfect? The transfer is great, but Bendjelloul’s visuals are mostly straightforward, requiring little but a sense of clarity and vividness; in other words, you won’t be disappointed.

What Else Is There? A commentary track featuring Bendjelloul and Rodriguez essentially gives away the mystery of whether or not the musician is still alive, but a pair of featurettes explores the back story beyond the filmmaker’s search, and showcases a recent Rodriguez performance.

How Badly Do I Want It? A tearjerking tale of artistry finally finding the recognition it deserves, this is an inspirational tale that will pep up any aspiring performer or creative type, so it might be good to have around permanently on those days when rejection notices come in the mail.

Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning (Sony Pictures Home Entertainment)

The One-Liner: Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren return for yet another installment in this interminable franchise, this time starring up-and-comer Scott Adkins as the victim of a home invasion who discovers he’s part of a bigger conspiracy than he ever imagined – and we quite frankly can understand.

Picture Perfect? Although the film was presented in 3D at fantastic Fest in 2012, it’s only a 2D Blu-ray, but the picture quality is terrific, preserving director John Hyams’ ambitious if not fully successful visual style.

What Else Is There? Three making-of featurettes dig into the production, while a commentary track featuring Hyams and Lundgren offering an ongoing discussion of its conceptual complexities, although perhaps not necessarily answering all of the logistical obstacles that keep the film from, well, making total sense.

How Badly Do I Want It? By all accounts this is a marked improvement from its predecessor, so if you’re a fan of the series this one’s a must-see, but otherwise it might be a good second feature after Death Race 3, if for no other reason than as a reminder that some direct-to-DVD releases are not as good as others.

Watch Celebuzz’ exclusive interview with Death Race 3 star Luke Goss, and then let us know in the comments below — which of these films are you most excited to get on Blu-ray?

Halloween fever started early this year as Adam Sandler’s Hotel Transylvania shot to the top of the box office over the weekend.

Scaring up solid opening-weekend grosses of $34 million, the film more than doubled the returns of its next-highest competition.

That said, Rian Johnson’s Looper , which stars Bruce Willis, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Emily Blunt, recouped more than two thirds of its reported $30 million budget with a haul of $21.2 million, an impressive showing that gives the filmmaker a commercial cache to match his critical bona fides.

What sort of returns did ‘Pitch Perfect’ produce?

Although Pitch Perfect came in at Number Six with a gross of $5.2 million, Universal’s music-themed movie did well in the context of its $17 million price tag, making it a minor success.

Meanwhile at Number Three, Jake Gyllenhaal’s End of Watch continues to perform solidly, earning $8 million and bringing its two-week tally to more than $26 million.

Trouble with the Curve, starring Clint Eastwood, Justin Timberlake and Amy Adams took home $7.5 million, landing it at Number Four and bringing its cumulative total to $23.7 million after just two weeks.

And Jennifer Lawrence’s House at the End of the Street followed at Number Five, earning another $7.1 million and bringing its theatrical gross to date to $22.2 million.

Jake Gyllenhaal shaves his head, Michael Pena bites the bullet, and writer-director David Ayer does what he’s been doing for years, delivering gritty tales about the ‘thin blue line that separates the prey from the predator’ on the posy-strewn paths of South-Central Los Angeles.

End Of Watch employs a pseudo-documentary style that amps up the action scenes, but ultimately, riding along Officers Taylor  (Gyllenhaal), and Zavala (Pena) is a bit of a drag.

Having grown up on the streets of South Central Los Angeles, Ayer has developed through relationships with both policemen and gangsters what he calls the ‘I-can-write-about-cops’ gene, as evidenced in his Oscar-winning Training Day and others in the genre like Street Kings and Dark Blue.

What is there to watch in Gyllenhaal’s latest?

With End Of Watch, Ayer tuns his lens on familiar territory capturing the on-duty hours of two patrol cops.

Shot in hyper-realistic style, he uses surveillance cameras, lipstick-cams, dash-cams and hand held cameras under the pretense that Taylor is studying filmmaking on the side and is recording his patrol as part of a project. Not that it couldn’t happen, but it sounds like something you’d see in a movie.

And Jake Gyllenhaal looks like someone you’d see in a movie — which is ironic considering his presence belies the elaborate low-budget/ripped-from-reality look Ayers so diligently affects.

What good is convincing us it’s real if you put a famous movie star front and center? The answer is the movie star draws the financing, and without him the movie doesn’t get made.

On patrol day after day, events unroll with the bare semblance of a plot as Taylor and Zavala cruise around talking about girlfriends, wives, work and just about everything else.

The two actors affect an easy rapport with the rhythms and structures of real conversation. While it feels extemporaneous, according to Ayer the dialogue in the movie is delivered as written with minimal ad-libbing.

The guys soon run afoul of a crime lord named Big Evil who, when asked why he’s called Big Evil, responds with the movie’s best line – “Because my evil… is big.” It’s a sentence that says practically nothing but still says it all.

Evil is tied to the Sinaloa cartel, one of Mexico’s deadliest, and it’s not long before Taylor and Zavala stumble into a hornet’s nest beyond any hope of escape.

While Ayer and his cast demonstrate a thorough understanding of their subject, and their movie features realistic violence and casual callousness, End Of Watch doesn’t really go anywhere.

It’s essentially hanging out with a pair of blunt and dimwitted cops who curse a lot and occasionally have fights, car chases and shootouts – after awhile it loses its charm.

Anna Kendrick drops in for a couple of scenes as Taylor’s girlfriend as if to remind us that he is not, in fact, married to Zavala in the movie. And America Ferrera has a cameo as a fellow cop, but if you blink you’ll miss her.

Gyllenhaal and Pena did five months of preparation for the shoot – ride-alongs with cops, fight training in an Echo Park gym, weapons work on the firing range – and it all appears authentic on the big screen.

But with sketched-in characters and thematic elements that tell us little more than “it’s tough out there on the streets,” End Of Watch is dismissible as a tonally unique but otherwise forgettable cop movie.

–review by Jordan Riefe

In addition to the ride-alongs Jake Gyllenhaal went on with the Los Angeles Police Department in preparation for his movie, End of Watch, the actor revealed Friday that he also got beat up for his new cop thriller.

The Oscar-nominated actor told David Gregory on Today that he spent “almost every morning five days a week fighting these kids in Echo Park at a great dojo. I got basically beaten up by these 14 to 20-year-old kids every morning.”

As the actor told Celebuzz in an interview, he and his co-star Michael Pena spent five months preparing for their 22-day shoot. They completed tactile training, fight training and the aforementioned ride-alongs, which included a visit to a murder scene. However, these five months weren’t just about training, they were also about building a real life friendship between the co-stars.

What did Gyllenhaal, 31, say his gritty new movie is really about?

“It’s about friendship, that’s what the movie is all about,” Gyllenhaal said.

“We shot all the scenes in the car in a day-and-a-half and that’s like 30 percent of the movie,” he said of the time him and Pena, 36, spent together. He added, “The reason why I gravitate to a movie is the heart in it and what it’s really trying to say.”

The Brokeback Mountain star mentioned the duo “had to prepare like that” for the raw and intense film as it’s shot from the point of view of police officers so the audience can feel as if they are in the car with them. In order to get that real feeling, it only makes sense they went

In addition to End of Watch, which Gyllenhaal also executive produced, the versatile actor will be making his debut in an off-Broadway play about a family.

You can watch Gyllenhaal’s entire interview above.

End of Watch hits theaters on Friday, Sept. 21.

It was the ultimate life altering preparation for the new cop thriller End of Watch.

“I had no idea what to expect when I went on the first ride along,” the film’s star Jake Gyllenhaal told Celebuzz in an interview to promote his upcoming action drama film about two police officers from the Los Angeles Police Department who come upon a startling discovery, making them the targets of a drug cartel.

“I didn’t know what I would encounter.”

What the 31-year-old uncovered on his first night out on the streets with the LAPD — a graveyard shift — changed his perspective forever. It was a true-life horror story.’

What happened?

“It was a gang shooting,” Gyllenhaal, who starred in Brokeback Mountain, added.

“It was obviously drug related. One gang member was walking down the street and another one was pulling out of his car and it was having to do with some issues between two different sects of a gang.”

Gyllenhaal and his costar, Michael Pena, 36, spent five months rehearsing and researching for their roles, often accompanying police on ride-alongs in a bid to give them unique insight into Los Angeles’ underbelly and the thin blue line that exists between mayhem — and the rest of socierty.

“Of course it was scary, but it was also thrilling and also really life affirming,” Gyllenhaal added, during the interview at Toronto International Film Festival.

“It changed my perspective on my life and my perspective on my work.”

The gritty new police drama – End of Watch hits theaters on Sept. 21 – was shot documentary style on the streets of Los Angeles.

In the movie’s climactic sequence, Pena and Gyllenhaal are chasing down a perpetrator when he pulls to the curb and flees on foot. In the driver’s seat, Pena wanted the wheels to squeal as they skidded to a stop, but wound up crashing into the parked vehicle.

“I stopped early — six seconds of screeching — crashed into the car,” Pena told Celebuzz. “We got out and finished the scene. It’s in the movie.”

Gyllenhaal, who executive produced End of Watch with a mini-budget of $7 million, found several things flashing through his head as the car careened out of control.

“We only have one car, we only have one stunt car, we only have on dash-cam shot-car, it’s going to be hours before we can fix the hood of the car,” sighed Gyllenhaal, when he chatted to Celebuzz.

“All of these things went through my mind as we were sliding into the other vehicle.”

“The car started bumping against the back of the van and then started rolling on the opposite side of the street,” said Gyllenhaal.

“Ultimately, as dangerous as it was, it was pretty fun, too.”