Stars: Harrison Ford, Kelly McGillis, Danny Glover, Josef Sommer, Lukas Haas, Alexander Godunov, Patti Lupone, Timothy Carhart, Viggo Mortensen, Brent Jennings, Ed Crowley, Angus MacInnes, Frederick Rolf

Director: Peter Weir

Summary: A hard boiled Philadelphia cop travels to a quiet Amish community to protect a young boy who has witnessed the murder of a narcotics agent. In this peaceful community, the policeman is forced to confront the essential character of his own violent profession.

After an Amish boy witnesses police corruption in a Philadelphia train station, a hardened cop takes him and his widowed mother back to their quiet Amish community. There, hiding from his crooked superiors, he is witness to a simpler and seductively innocent world. Academy Award Nominations: 8, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor--Harrison Ford. Academy Awards: Best Original Screenplay, Best Editing.

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When Samuel (Lukas Haas), a young Amish boy travelling with his mother Rachel (Kelly McGillis), witnesses the murder of a police officer in a public restroom, he and his mother become the temporary wards of John Book (Harrison Ford), a detective who's been assigned to solve the crime. After suspect line-ups and mug-shot books yield nothing, Samuel, in the most memorable scene of the film, recognizes the murderer as a narcotics agent whose picture he sees in the precinct. Once Book realizes that the police chief is in on it, too, he whisks Samuel and Rachel back home to Amish country, where he himself goes into hiding as a plain Amish man. Witness' juxtaposition of the life of the Amish and the violence of inner-city police corruption work surprisingly well for the story, and Kelly McGillis as the falling in love widow gives an almost perfect performance. Directed by Peter Weir, the film is extremely successful in drawing the viewer into its world and, accordingly, is immensely entertaining. The only thing that mars its polish is the one-dimensional, almost cartoonish handling of the upper-echelon police corruption--a subtler, more realistic treatment of this aspect of the story would have rendered the film near perfect. --James McGrath, Amazon.com

Aspect Ratio:	1.78 Anamorphic Wide Screen
Main Language:	English
Region:	Region 2
Special Features:	Theatrical Trailer, Interview With Peter Weir
Subtitles:	Croatian, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish
Year:	1985
Release Date:	October 2, 2000
Runtime:	108 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	P H E 8020
Keywords:	General, Wide, Screen, Witness, Thriller
Genre:	Thriller