The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

41. 1985 - Witness

Witness Harrison Ford Lukas Haas
Paramount Pictures

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.

 
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WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.