The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

Honourable Mentions: After Hours, To Live and Die in L.A., Ran

Witness might just be Harrison Ford's greatest film. Despite the accompanying Oscar nomination to back such a statement up, it's also likely to raise a few eyebrows, given Ford's career includes such illustrious acting highs as Raiders of the Lost Ark, Blade Runner, and The Fugitive - movies for which he received immense acclaim and box office success - but it shouldn't.

Peter Weir's 1985 neo noir - of a Philadelphia cop forced to go into hiding with the Amish after a young boy (Lukas Haas) witnesses a murder - is dark, subtle, and nakedly vulnerable, all qualities you could argue made Ford such a compelling leading figure following his emergence in the seventies.

The real genius of Witness isn't just that it tackles what at first seems like a left-field premise with complete sincerity, but that it plays totally and utterly to Ford's strengths as a performer. Australian filmmaker Weir enmeshes the film in the codes and rituals of two societies - the Amish on one hand, and the police on the other - while tapping into Ford's vulnerability and intense sex appeal. His character, John Book, strikes up a star-crossed romance with Kelly McGillis' Rachel Lapp - a recently widowed Amish mother of the previously mentioned child witness - with the pair sharing a pained kind of yearning as their relationship develops in the midst of an unravelling conspiracy.

The end result is something thoroughly unique - a neo-noir romance caught between two worlds, punctuated by sudden, unceremonious violence and cathartic eruptions of love and passion. It's Weir at the peak of his powers, complemented by a haunting Maurice Jarre score and the epic photography of John Seale, with Ford the fulcrum as the embattled detective.