Dog Day Afternoon Reviews

As much as it is about a deeply troubled individual, "Dog Day Afternoon" is about a shift toward exploitation in the American media via live television.

Full Review | Original Score: A+

Strong performances and forward-thinking situations make this political thriller an exceptionally vibrant experience.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4

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

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Fine, but overrated Pacino vehicle directed by Lumet.

| Original Score: 4/5

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

Full Review | Original Score: A

[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.

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Dog Day Afternoon is, in the whole as well as the parts, filmmaking at its best.

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An American classic.

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Pure cinema.

| Original Score: 5/5

| Original Score: 4/5

An iconic movie, thoroughly New York, with Pacino in top form.

Full Review | Original Score: A

| Original Score: 5/5

[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.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5

Few fictional thrillers are as tense or as funny as this real-life recreation.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10

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.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5

Pacino simmers in this daring and brilliantly constructed treatise on the many facets of a crime.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5

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.

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| Original Score: 4/5

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.

Lumet is exploring the clichés, not just using them.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4