A well-crafted film with great performances, but which lingers on the unimportant details and then strangely rushes the crux of the story. It's a bit like a Grandpa Simpson anecdote. The early sections of the film amble along at the pace of a six-episode TV show, filling in enormous amounts of the characters' back stories, much of which is simply not relevant to the plot. By the time the two main characters lives finally begin to converge, there's no time left to explore how and why their relationship develops the way it does--which is the really interesting part of the story. This has the odd effect of making the denouement, even though it is based on fact, seem somewhat unlikely.
Review of American Gangster
