Metacritic reviews

An ambitious, energetic thriller that stops short of real excitement for reasons that are hard to pinpoint. It's an entertaining movie, and an extremely well-acted one.

I admired the movie. It is made with quiet competence, and will remind some viewers of the Hitchcock who made “The Thirty-Nine Steps” and “Foreign Correspondent.”

A gripping, old-fashioned WWII spy thriller.

It’s a good yarn, remindful of some of Alfred Hitchcock and Fritz Lang’s wartime mellers as well as Michael Powell’s 1939 tale of a World War I German agent in Scotland, The Spy in Black.

On an afternoon as wet as those on the island, the film would pass the time agreeably, nothing more.

Richard Marquand opts largely for more intimate surrounding and manages to squeeze out some memorable moments of Hitchcockian suspense and tension.

The oddity of this romance and its picturesque setting do a great deal to lend interest to an otherwise minimal (for a spy picture) story. [24 July 1981, p.19]

As a bestseller, this was a good read, but on film, the crimes the Needle commits on his escape route are so psychopathically gory that he is rendered loathsome. Sutherland's sometimes effective stillness, and some routine direction, are also offputting. On the other hand, Nelligan's anguish is quite touching; she grants the film's final passages a certain suspenseful, almost redeeming, grace.

Eye of the Needle never really catches fire. Marquand and screenwriter Stanley Mann may have overestimated the strength of their story: they serve it up unembellished, with competent but imperhat...Eye of the Needle isn't a bad film, just an unnecessary one: it was a better movie as a book. [3 August 1981, p.50]

The tussle between David and The Needle seems to release a Pandora's Box of outrageous scenes. [24 July 1981, p.D8]