Average Rating: 8.1/10
Reviews Counted: 30
Fresh: 28 | Rotten: 2
A wonderfully entertaining thriller within an unusual setting, with Harrison Ford delivering a surprisingly emotive and sympathetic performance.
Average Rating: N/A
Critic Reviews: 3
Fresh: 2 | Rotten: 1
A wonderfully entertaining thriller within an unusual setting, with Harrison Ford delivering a surprisingly emotive and sympathetic performance.
liked it
Average Rating: 3.5/5
User Ratings: 43,454
In Peter Weir's thriller Witness, Samuel (Lukas Haas), a young Amish boy, witnesses a murder in the restroom of a Philadelphia bus station. Harrison Ford stars as John Book, the police detective investigating the murder. When Book discovers that the crime was part of a conspiracy involving several officials in his department, he flees Philadelphia to the Amish community where Samuel lives with his widowed mother, Rachel (Kelly McGillis). Slowly assimilating himself into the Amish community, Book
R, 1 hr. 52 min.
Feb 8, 1985 Wide
Jun 29, 1999
Paramount Pictures
All Critics (31) | Top Critics (4) | Fresh (36) | Rotten (2) | DVD (28)
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.
Harrison Ford has never given a better performance in a movie.
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 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.
It's edge-of-your seat thriller material, and great portrayals by everyone in the film.
Generally transcends its time and becomes more than a cop thriller, more than a movie about two worlds in conflict, more than a love story.
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.
Shocking drama/thriller from director Peter Weir and actor Harrison Ford tells of an Amish boy who witnesses a murder in the restroom. When police officer John Book (Ford) becomes aware of this, he cuts immediately to interrogating the bow of what he saw. He asks the boy to try and find one of the two men he saw
November 11, 2011Super Reviewer
In recent years the thriller genre has become so closely hybridised with action that we expect almost every thriller to be high-octane, ass-kicking entertainment. Whether it's the ultra-macho shootout in Michael Mann's Heat or the second unit work on the Bourne series, when we heard the word 'thriller' we expect
July 30, 2011
Super Reviewer
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