AllMovie gave the movie five stars out of five. The review defined it as "a quintessential 1970s story", and focused on the film's "contemporary tensions over law, media, and sexuality". Christopher Null wrote in 2006 that the film "captures perfectly the zeitgeist of the early 1970s, a time when optimism was scraping rock bottom and John Wojtowicz was as good a hero as we could come up with". During the 2011 San Francisco International Film Festival, the film was included as a tribute to Pierson for his recent death. The "San Francisco Chronicle" reflected on the time of its release, and the reviewer felt that "it seemed as if the great movies would never stop, when the extraordinary creative burst we'd been seeing in the 1970s looked as though it might go on forever". "The A.V. Club" called it a "frank social melodrama that’s also a celebration of quotidian bravery", while it praised the cinematography by Kemper that "captures the joy as well as the decay of a crowded city". "IGN" delivered a good review, and considered Pacino's performance to be "spectacular, and achieves a kind of nuance and complexity that few actors from his or any other generation have before or since achieved". Meanwhile, the reviewer considered that the movie displayed the reason Cazale was "one of the great character actors of all time".