Metacritic reviews

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

Dog Day Afternoon is a frank social melodrama that’s also a celebration of quotidian bravery. The camera might linger on guns and barely restrained violence, but it also dwells upon the love and the support that’s extended in the weirdest and most unexpected of places.

A masterly reconstruction of a Brooklyn bank siege on August 22, 1972, built around arguably Al Pacino's finest screen performance.

The entire cast is excellent, top to bottom. Dog Day Afternoon is, in the whole as well as the parts, film-making at its best.

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. This is, of course, one of the classic Pacino roles - he's so appealing - but don't overlook the late John Cazale as his accomplice, who gives us a character who's stupid and scared, troubled and dangerous, and disturbingly inscrutable.

Dog Day Afternoon benefits immeasurably from a cast and crew doing some of the finest work of their careers. One of the finest films of the 1970s.

Dog Day Afternoon is a melodrama, based on fact, about a disastrously illplanned Brooklyn bank robbery, and 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. And he has a good feel for the big-city crowd that's quickly drawn to the action.

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.

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.