 Janet Maslin of "The New York Times" wrote that "the strength of "Cop Land" is in its hard-edged, novelistic portraits, which pile up furiously during the film's dynamic opening scenes ...Yet if the price of Mangold's casting ambitions is a story that can't, finally, match its marquee value, that value is still inordinately strong.Everywhere the camera turns in this tense and volatile drama, it finds enough interest for a truckload of conventional Hollywood fare.