DOG DAY AFTERNOON

On a sweaty, August afternoon, inexperienced criminal Sonny (Al Pacino) and his accomplice Sal (John Cazale) attempt to rob a bank in Brooklyn. Things go wrong from the start, and the hapless crooks find themselves in an increasingly intense pressure cooker as they take hostages and as the media and FBI descend on the scene. Pacino delivers an electric performance as a queer man motivated by love, and Cazele is brilliantly understated as Sonny’s quietly anxious but loyal brother in crime. Lumet delivers a relentless chronicle of desperation, expertly navigating between the chaos of an active crime scene, to the pain of an intimate phone conversation between Sonny and his lover, Leon. Humidity and doom seep through the screen in one of the most powerful films of the 1970s.