Enjoyable and even exciting at the start, Dog Day Afternoon degenerates into frustration and tedium toward nightfall -- an experience no less painful for the audience than for the actors.
Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted: 36
Fresh: 35
Rotten:1
Average Rating: 8.5/10
Runtime: 2 hrs 10 mins
Genre: Dramas
Synopsis: Al Pacino plays a ferocious and fed-up bank robber in Lumet's classic film DOG DAY AFTERNOON. Balancing suspense, violence, and humor, the film's depiction of a grand-scale media event craftily... Al Pacino plays a ferocious and fed-up bank robber in Lumet's classic film DOG DAY AFTERNOON. Balancing suspense, violence, and humor, the film's depiction of a grand-scale media event craftily dives from the political to the personal, evoking a piercing portrait of a man and his devastating downward tumble as seen through the media circus that Lumet made a career of chronicling. Pacino is heartbreakingly real as Sonny, a smart yet self-destructive Brooklyn tough whose plan to rob the local bank to fund his male lover's (Chris Sarandon) sex change goes absurdly wrong. Accompanied only by his doltish accomplice, Sal (John Cazale), Sonny realizes that all the money had been removed before his arrival, and decides to kidnap a handful of bank employees instead. As the lengthy August day drags on, Sonny and hordes of local police, led by Sergeant Moretti (Charles Durning), make little progress, and eventually Sonny's wife and lover are brought to the scene. The crowd's sympathy is immediately captured by the charismatic Sonny, whose antagonism with the police is played out before an audience of millions, leading to an inevitably tragic finish. [More]
Starring: Al Pacino, John Cazale, Charles Durning, James Broderick
Starring: Al Pacino, John Cazale, Charles Durning, James Broderick, Chris Sarandon, Carol Kane
Director: Sidney Lumet
Director: Sidney Lumet
Screenwriter: Frank Pierson
Producer: Martin Bregman, Martin Elfand
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Reviews for Dog Day Afternoon
One of Sidney Lumet's best jobs of directing and one of Al Pacino's best performances (as a bisexual bank robber) come together in a populist thriller with lots of New York juice
Though fact-based, Lumet's heist film (his best work) is a wild satire with farcical tones about a normless, irrational society whose (anti)heroes are crazy delusional marginal men, played with panache by Pacino and Cazale in their most spontaneous turns
[Pacino] gives an electric performance, charged with a lunatic energy that expertly captures the weird blend of confidence and self-deprecation (if not hatred) that marks the paranoid syndrome.
Dog Day Afternoon is, in the whole as well as the parts, filmmaking at its best.
[Dog Day Afternoon is] so perfectly executed that it almost feels like the wall of art is being pulled back slightly, revealing the reality of life, in all its messy, contradictory, confusing wonder.
Few fictional thrillers are as tense or as funny as this real-life recreation.
captures perfectly the zeitgeist of the early 1970s, a time when optimism was scraping rock bottom and John Wojtowicz was as good a hero as we could come up with.
Pacino simmers in this daring and brilliantly constructed treatise on the many facets of a crime.
The film's strength lies in its depiction of surfaces, lacking the visual or intellectual imagination to go beyond its shrewd social and psychological observations and its moments of absurdist humour.
It's beautifully acted by performers who appear to have grown up on the city's sidewalks in the heat and hopelessness of an endless midsummer.
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November 17, 2005:
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