 Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film a perfect four star rating and opined, "This is an engrossing story, told smoothly and well." Ebert also praised Crowe's performance, saying that his contribution to the storytelling was "enormous". Paul Byrnes of The Sydney Morning Herald felt that American Gangster was "one of the most intelligent gangster films in years" and expressed that the film offers "the spectacle of grand themes and two bigger-than-life characters played by two of the best actors in cinema." Concluding his review, Byrnes gave the film four out of four stars. IGN's Jim "Stax" Vejvoda rated the film four out of five stars, praising the acting — particularly of the two protagonists, "both dynamic presences on-screen, with neither actor outweighing the other's importance to the story" — and declaring that despite being preceded by other gangster stories such as Scarface and The Sopranos, American Gangster managed to justify its existence with "emphasis on the human and class elements of the story". Manohla Dargis of The New York Times strongly commended the film, opining that "greatness hovers just outside American Gangster." She continued: "It's a seductive package, crammed with all the on-screen and off-screen talent that big-studio money can buy, and filled with old soul and remixed funk that evoke the city back in the day, when heroin turned poor streets white and sometimes red." These sentiments were echoed by Sukhdev Sandhu of The Telegraph, who asserted that the storyline was "amazing".
