Eyewitness

I've seen so many thrillers that, frankly, I don't always care how they turn out — unless they're really well-crafted. What I like about Eyewitness is that, although it does care how it turns out, it cares even more about the texture of the scenes leading to the denouement. Read full review

Director Peter Yates takes Tesich's basically wobbly story and makes much more out of it, driving the tale and the characters at a hectic pace and providing some truly unnerving moments. Read full review

Back from their respective voids and together for the firs time, Hurt and Weaver romp romantically as janitor and TV news reporter in Eyewitness, a murky mystery produced and directed by Peter Yates and written by Steve Tesich, the guys who uplifted us via Breaking Away. [06 Mar 1981, p.15]

The Yugoslav-born Tesich is a wry romantic, a moonstruck jester, and his tendency toward excess is nicely complemented by Britisher Yates's crisp but delicate professionalism. With a superb cast at their disposal, they've taken a somewhat preposterous film noir plot and enriched it with quirky, meaty characterizations to produce a nervous comedy of menace about class distinctions and romantic and political obsession. [02 Mar 1981, p.81]

Steve Tesich's script sometimes smacks of screenwriting classes, but Yates (who worked with Tesich on Breaking Away) easily accommodates these lapses with his unfussy, medium-fast direction. Indeed, he guides his cast around the furniture better than most. The result is an enjoyable entertainment whose box-office failure was thoroughly undeserved. Read full review

Eyewitness provides 90 minutes of the best entertainment I've seen all year. Unfortunately, the movie is almost two hours long. That leaves about 30 minutes of material we'd all be better off without. [12 Mar 1981, p.18]

A thoroughly delightful but far from plausible mystery melodrama that operates exclusively on high spirits and a no-nonsense intelligence that is never sidetracked by coherence. Read full review

The movie's very smoothness may set viewers up for a letdown. It's a low-key exercise in genre suspense and romance that fails to generate a high level of excitement or deliver classic dynamic thrills. [06 Mar 1981, p.C1]

The director Peter Yates and the writer Steve Tesich try to make a new, more meaningful version of a 40s melodrama, but their Manhattan-set thriller bogs down in a tangle of plot.

Weaver plays her part very well, but simply can’t justify the character’s actions, which ripple through the murder plot in several directions. Consequently, the story gets more and more strained before it’s resolved. Read full review