"Witness...combines a melodramatic plot of big-city paranoia about crooked cops with an ethnographic insertion of quaint Amish customs. While the contrasting locales are accented almost to a point of artificiality, cutting through it all is an extraordinarily creative performance by Harrison Ford as the hard-boiled but unexpectedly charming detective John Book. Most surprisingly, Witness came up a success especially because of a powerful dose of old-fashioned star charisma and a strong voltage of chemistry between hero and heroine. Ford and Kelly McGillis singularly resurrect the marvelous Look that passed between men and women in films gone by. Even against a context of anthropological plot wiring and the director's extreme discretion in cutting away from emotional payoffs, the Look conquers all, partially in the frisson-creating semi-nude-after-the-bath scene, but above all in the spirit of romanticism in the car-radio-in-the-hayloft dance epiphany that is the highlight of the movie. Weir is still growing as a master of economic narration and rich ideograms, and the combination of solemnity and celebration in Witness is strongly reminiscent of fellow Australian Bruce Beresford's Tender Mercies." Andrew Sarris, Tom Allen, Village Voice