Roger Ebert of the "Chicago Sun-Times" awarded the film three and a half out of four stars, praising the performances and declaring it one of the year's best films, saying, "The actors in "Under Fire" never step wrong. Nolte is great to watch as the seedy photographer with the beer gut. Hackman never really convinced me that he could be an anchorman, but he did a better thing. He convinced me that he thought he could be one. Joanna Cassidy takes a role that could have been dismissed as 'the girl' and fills it out as a fascinating, textured adult. "Under Fire" surrounds these performances with a vivid sense of place and becomes, somewhat surprisingly, one of the year's best films." Geoff Andrew of "Time Out" praised the film as "tak an honourable place alongside classic war-torn romance pictures like Casablanca and To Have and Have Not" and concluded by calling it "a thrilling film, with a head, a heart, and muscle."