Dog Day Afternoon: Critic Reviews

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 cliches, not just using them.

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

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

[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.

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

Fine, but overrated Pacino vehicle directed by Lumet.

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

An American classic.

Pure cinema.

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

[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.

Pacino gives an engaging performance.