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 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

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

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

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

| 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

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

| Apr 7, 2024

An excellent motion picture... with Sidney Lumet's direction a gem and Al Pacino's performance one that covers the entire range of human emotion.

| Apr 7, 2024

From start to end it is engrossing and unpredictable, and although hindsight raises a few questions, "Dog Day" works as it plays.

| Apr 7, 2024

The two-level film, so witty and so sad, is dominated by the acting of Al Pacino, but has fine character acting from others.

| Apr 7, 2024

The fact is, as one of the screen's most versatile and major talents today, Pacino can hold any audience in, I would suppose, any role he would choose.

| Apr 7, 2024

It is the busy and eclectic Lumet's best film for some considerable time.

| Apr 7, 2024

Dog Day Afternoon has the considerable merit of being a film unlike the others, with a strangeness that could only derive from origins in real life.

| Apr 7, 2024

Pierson and Lumet have come up with a movie of surprising wit, humor, and understanding.

| Apr 7, 2024

"Dog Day Afternoon" is, from beginning to end, simply splendid.

| Apr 7, 2024