Witness: Critic Reviews

It's pretty to look at and it contains a number of good performances, but there is something exhausting about its neat balancing of opposing manners and values.

Harrison Ford has never given a better performance in a movie.

Playing John Book allowed viewers the opportunity to see Ford the actor instead of Ford the action/adventure icon. It is one of the few times he has been given the opportunity to play in a straight drama.

A Podcast Q+A with Kelly McGillis, much awkwardness and bizarre fawning to follow.

Harrison Ford renders one of his best dramatic performances, for which he won his sole Oscar nomination, in Peter Weir's beautifully shot feature, which is effective as a cop thriller as well as a chronicle of the rural Amish subculture.

A lot of care and attention has gone into both the Oscar-winning screenplay and the beautiful cinematography, to create a powerful and romantic story.

My favourite Peter Weir film, Witness is something special...Three years after Blade Runner, Harrison Ford is at his best, while Kelly McGillis in her second film role, exudes a Grace Kelly-like serenity.

Ford is on top of his form, underplaying his role throughout and never mugging it up for the cameras.

...a refreshingly adult story.

Powerful, assured, full of beautiful imagery and thankfully devoid of easy moralising, it also offers a performance of surprising skill and sensitivity from Ford.

Fish-out-of-water stories were very popular for a while in the 1980s, but none had the classical resonance of this powerful Oscar-nominated drama.

Humanizes the conflict of peace versus the arguable necessity of violence.

It's got some action, some romance, a few drips of comedy, and a lot of fascinating insight into a culture we know very little about.

takes a high concept idea and turns it into a character study more suspenseful and more rewarding than the anticipated norm

A compelling thriller, a smoldering love story, a thoughtful study in comparative cultures, and a respectful exploration of religious community and nonviolence.

A dynamic, thoughtful thriller that balances its themes extraordinarily well.

An offence to the Amish

A sure-footed thriller, beautifully photographed and featuring one of Harrison Ford's best performances.

Weir's fish-out-of-water cop drama radiates marvelously as both a culture-clash romancer and as a compelling crime caper