Witness

Witness (1985) begins with an Amish boy witnessing a murder in Philadelphia. The detective protecting him and his mother is wounded and takes shelter on a farm in Lancaster County, and the rest of the film is two worlds placed side by side. It was Peter Weir's first American film, and the outsider's eye of an Australian director serves it well; the Amish community is neither idealised nor pitied. Harrison Ford received the only Oscar nomination of his career for it. The film won Best Original Screenplay and Best Film Editing from eight nominations. The Amish themselves were not pleased. The Pennsylvania community said the filming and the tourism that followed disrupted their lives, opposed similar productions, and asked the state to restrict filming in the area. The barn raising sequence is the best known part of it, scored by Maurice Jarre. It runs 112 minutes. Good for: crime crossed with character drama, encounters between cultures, and the restrained Hollywood of the eighties. Less good for: the film builds a love story and leaves it unresolved, which is deliberate but unsatisfying. The violence arrives abruptly and cuts against the calm of everything around it.