Dog Day Afternoon may throw calculated criticisms at the invasive nature of television media and explore the nature of criminality, but remains a perfect example of cutting-edge '70s cinema for those who want to be reminded.

| Original Score: 9/10 | Nov 23, 2024

What starts as a very funny movie -- on the order of a realistic escapade involving the Keystone Kops -- evolves into a very sobering drama.

| Apr 10, 2024

The film's tone is extraordinarily flexible, holding within the same reality elements of the absurd, the ridiculous and the comic while sustaining a sense of tension and dread throughout.

| Apr 7, 2024

[Pacino's] performance here is spectacular, and achieves a kind of nuance and complexity that few actors from his or any other generation have before or since achieved.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Apr 7, 2024

Pacino's inner alienation transforms this film into something far beyond a simple historical recreation of an "actual" event.

| Apr 7, 2024

One of the best "New York" movies ever made.

| Apr 7, 2024

There are scattered moments of wry humor, sudden pathos, and correct observation throughout.

| Apr 7, 2024

A biting satire on life today where the criminal can get the crowd behind him.

| Apr 7, 2024

Sidney Lumet begins his film as a comedy, almost. He finishes it as a qualified tragedy. Between the two, there is a detailed, absorbing, by turns horrifying and hilarious picture...

| Apr 7, 2024

Sidney Lumet's gritty and gripping semi-documentary crime melodrama "Dog Day Afternoon” is a triumphant new classic of American movie naturalism.

| Apr 7, 2024

A triumph for Sidney Lumet.

| Apr 7, 2024

Electric but erratic...

| Apr 7, 2024

A point of view is needed and so is a dramatic strategy and neither the screenwriter nor the director has bothered to devise them.

| Apr 7, 2024

Pacino works furiously... but his efforts fail under the onslaught of bad jokes and the sheer passage of time...

| Apr 7, 2024

Dog Day Afternoon winds up a bore. It fails on all levels, especially in its construction.

| Apr 7, 2024

It is in the streets and small shops and neighborhoods that the major madnesses of our time take place -- and Lumet has captured them with throbbing truth.

| Apr 7, 2024

Very much as in "The Sugarland Express," also factually based, which saw petty criminals as folk heroes and the police as pigs, a process in which television is shown again, amusingly and alarmingly, to play a part.

| Apr 7, 2024

In the portrayal of Sonny’s farcical-sad situation there lies more evidence of humanity then in nearly all the melodramatic cops-and-robbers epic of the screen.

| Apr 7, 2024

Dog Day Afternoon is funny, moving and sad, often at the same time, and it's beautifully acted by everyone concerned, especially Pacino and John Cazale...

| Apr 7, 2024

Quite the best cops-and-robbers film to have come out of America this year.

| Apr 7, 2024