This has been one of my favourites ever since I first watched it, and was really one of the first ‘old’ movies I watched, when I was around 15 or 16. I love how fast the movie starts, practically straight into Al Pacino clumsily pulling out his shotgun, and how it never slows down, very typical of Sidney Lumet at his peak, the Seventies; how it’s simultaneously manically hilarious and deadly serious. Al Pacino and John Cazale are fantastic as the bank robbers, and there’s a fantastic supporting cast from Penelope Allen as the main bank teller (love how together she is, lol, “Are you kidding?” she asks the cops when they suggest to Pacino that, since she’s outside the bank at one point, she may as well stay out, “Those are my girls in there!”), Carol Kane (“It’s my boyfriend, he wants to know what time you think you’ll be through”), Chris Sarandon, Lance Henrikson and Charles Durning, most of whom were still very early on in their film careers. A true classic, and I think the best heist movie of all time, so real it’s unreal.

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