Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
Directed by Sidney Lumet
Based on the true story of would-be Brooklyn bank robbers John Wojtowicz and Salvatore Naturile. Sonny and Sal attempt a bank heist which quickly turns sour and escalates into a hostage situation and stand-off with the police. As Sonny's motives for the robbery are slowly revealed and things become more complicated, the heist turns into a media circus.
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What critics compared Dog Day Afternoon to
Even before the knowingly retro typography of the opening titles kicks in, it’s clear that the sweaty urgency of 1970s New Hollywood — in particular, such hard-headed urban dramas as “Dog Day Afternoon” and “Taxi Driver” — is a key point of reference for the Safdies here.
Led by Robert Pattinson, giving arguably his most commanding performance to date as a desperate bank robber cut from the same cloth as Al Pacino's Sonny Wortzik in Dog Day Afternoon, this is a richly textured genre piece that packs a visceral charge in its restless widescreen visuals and adrenalizing music, which recalls the great mood-shaping movie scores of Tangerine Dream.
You have to go back into the vaults — maybe as far back as “Dog Day Afternoon” — to find a movie about a New York bank robber more intense than Benny and Josh Safdie’s ironically titled drama “Good Time.”
Their latest seems to take as its model another Al Pacino vehicle of the seventies, “Dog Day Afternoon.”
He's the subject of the movie's biggest, if most improbable, joke as well as its darkest, most despairing one, but Connie is the real star of the film, and the movie's point is his desperation - like Sonny in "Dog Day Afternoon," Connie is always thinking, always looking for the next angle.
The mise-en-scène evokes the feverishly lit, mysterious nighttime scenes and dread-ridden days of the defining ’70s cinematic era of urban psychodramas that included the likes of Taxi Driver and Dog Day Afternoon.
This entertaining trick requires the moral sophistication evident in his moody and underrated 25th Hour and is reminiscent of two classic New York crime films from the 1970s -- Dog Day Afternoon, referred to by Frazier, and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.
Spike Lee's riveting bank heist/hostage film breaks all the rules and comes across as a reworking of a very tired genre that started with Sidney Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon.
The script, written by first-time screenwriter Russell Gewirtz, is a clever little potboiler that combines the keep-you-guessing psychological element of Alfred Hitchcock with the socio-political tension of Sidney Lumet’s “Dog Day Afternoon” (one of Lee’s favorite films, and mentioned by Washington in this film).
Multiple references are made throughout to Sidney Lumet's "Dog Day Afternoon" (1975).
It also pays tribute to the Sidney Lumet classics Dog Day Afternoon and Serpico.
As much a mystery as it is a suspense-thriller, this bank-heist film combines elements from both "Dog Day Afternoon" and "The Usual Suspects."
But while Phillips goes out of his way to channel the visual aesthetics of works like Dog Day Afternoon , Network , Taxi Driver , After Hours and The King of Comedy , his ends up being only a surface level dissection of these types of characters and this sort milieu.
With his open nod the New Hollywood films of the 1970s, particularly the Scorsese classics Taxi Driver and King of Comedy (but also One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Dog Day Afternoon ) writer/director Todd Phillips has offered a powerful depiction of one man’s mental breakdown in the context of a society tearing itself apart.
Instead, Joker draws on the grubby “New York Shitty” cinematic canon of the late 1960s through mid-70s – with a particular debt owed to Death Wish (1974), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), and Taxi Driver (1976).
Gotham City as envisaged here is modelled on the New York of 1970s films like Dog Day Afternoon and Taxi Driver – over-populated, crime-ridden and grimy in a manner that has since become a shorthand for cinematic integrity.
Set in the fictional Gotham City in the late ‘70s/early ‘80s, Joker is a slick, heady pastiche of The King of Comedy , Network , Dog Day Afternoon , and 80 years of DC Comics stories distilled into a supremely stylish and affecting package.
Argo isn’t quite on the level of the Sidney Lumet classics to which Affleck pays stylistic homage—smart and taut as it is, it lacks the broader political vision of a film like Dog Day Afternoon .
And the pacing is exquisite, recalling such classics as Dog Day Afternoon and The Marathon Man .
That’s especially true in the terrific final act, when the film goes from “Wag the Dog”-type satire to “Dog Day Afternoon” and “Midnight Express”-style tension.
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Uncut Gems follows a similar formula, but it’s even slicker and more propulsive, evoking such classics as Dog Day Afternoon and After Hours in its ability to wring maximum ‘what now?’ tension from its milieu.
But as he gets deeper into trouble with an ever-widening group of enemies, the movie’s tone darkens, ending in a hostage situation at the jewelry store that recalls the gang-who-couldn’t-shoot-straight standoff of Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon .
If Good Time , which you can view on Amazon Prime, had something of the feel of Dog Day Afternoon , Uncut Gems made me think of Bad Lieutenant, the pugnacious 1992 Abel Ferrara film about a not-nice police officer, memorably played by Harvey Keitel, and his attempts to survive his gambling addiction during a New York Mets playoff run.
As we go deeper into it, we're reminded of the films of the late Sidney Lumet, the Big Apple's master spinner of cops 'n' robbers tales (Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead).
It’s an apt enough comparison, although Chandor’s style tends to be less teeming and comprehensive than the approach the late Lumet took in movies such as Serpico, Prince of the City, Dog Day Afternoon and Q & A.
He’s reflecting on the recent past, but behind the camera, in 2014, his director might be daydreaming about Dog Day Afternoon.
Together they’re a little like Al Pacino’s Sonny in Dog Day Afternoon, very human and naive enough to think they’ll get away with it.
It’s like a sea-bound “Dog Day Afternoon,” only with the hostages as the heroes.
The story is simple – Dog Day Afternoon simple.
I mean we cheered Bonnie and Clyde because we saw them rob the big banks but let customers keep their own money; we cheered Al Pacino in “Dog Day Afternoon” because we really came to empathize with him; and we sympathized with the prisoners in “In the Name of the Father” because we saw the role politics and coerced confessions played in their convictions.
So we get a good heist movie that can be filed alongside genre classics like Heat and Dog Day Afternoon, along with one of the year’s better love stories.
(Disabling cell phones wasnâ??t a problem that Al Pacino and John Cazale ever had to confront in Dog Day Afternoon.)
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Though American Hustle resembles Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas and Casino in certain particulars of plot and milieu (but not in its visual style, which is more functional than Scorsese-ecstatic), the real touchstones for its outer-borough shenanigans are Saturday Night Fever and the Sidney Lumet films Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon : manic street operas, in which the arias were Italians and Jews shouting at one another.
Her father is legendary director Sidney Lumet, the man behind “Network,” “Dog Day Afternoon” and “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.”
You could guess that this headlong tragicomedy, berserk with confessionalism, came from the household that gave us such psyche-spilling works as Dog Day Afternoon and the film of Long Day’s Journey into Night.