"Anybody who had even the slightest contact with Gandolfini will testify to what a great guy he was, how full of life he was, how extraordinary he made other people feel. Yes, absolutely, he had problems – with drink, with drugs, with women, probably with lots of other things, for all we know – but so does everybody, to one degree or another. But whether he was feeling well or poorly, or living smartly or stupidly, there was always something about the guy that you wanted to embrace."
"Tony in particular represents a character who draws immense power from his ethnic heritage - not just a cultural identity in terms of tastes in clothing and food, but a line of work that is inextricably linked to his being Italian American. Yet even as that identity confers great power on Tony, it paralyzes him and his family from actually moving into anything like a sustainable future. Despite being able to squeeze out a living by using brute force, the show makes clear that in the long run, it's over for the Mob - in one telling incident, two of Tony's goombahs try to shake down a new Starbucks franchise for protection money. They're told that since all decisions are made by corporate bean-counters in Seattle, there's no way the manager can give them anything. Even the straws and coffee stirrers are accounted for, the manager explains. The disappointed gangsters walk out of the franchise muttering that the small independent guy can no longer make a living. At the series' start, Tony had hoped that his children would not follow him into organized crime. By the ambiguous end of the series, that seems unlikely, even as it consigns his kids - with the non-ethnic names Meadow and A.J. - to a dark life."
"The Fini: A Salut'." Sarah D. Bunting of previously.tv on Gandolfini as New Jersey icon. See also: Jake Cole's film.com article, appreciating Gandolfini's distinctive voice.
"Now, James Gandolfini, who of course isn't Tony Soprano but who inhabited that icon of the suburbs of God's Little Acre so fully that, for the natives, it's as though one of the blue-dinosaur ship-loaders of Kearny has gone missing. Or all of them. Everyone knew at least one kid with a dad like Tony, a dad with jewelry and unspecified job duties who appeared in a robe, gingerly, at 4 PM and called us 'hon' and 'chief.' We recognized Tony immediately."
Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.