[2] The film stars Jack Lemmon, Sissy Spacek, Melanie Mayron, John Shea, Janice Rule and Charles Cioffi.

It received four nominations at the 55th Academy Awards; Best Picture, Best Actor (for Lemmon), Best Actress (for Spacek) and won Best Adapted Screenplay.

[5] Ed Horman, a conservative businessman from New York, arrives in Chile to search for his son Charlie, a journalist who disappeared during the recent military coup.

One U.S. diplomat is polite and friendly but consistently lies to him; a high-ranking American military attaché is blunt and tells Ed that whatever happened to Charlie was his own fault, stating, "You play with fire, you get burned."

When they receive proof that Charlie was murdered by the junta and that the U.S. allowed it to happen, he tells the embassy officials, "I just thank God we live in a country where we can still put people like you in jail!"

In 1983, a year after the film's theatrical release, both the film (then in the home video market) and Thomas Hauser's book The Execution of Charles Horman were removed from the United States market following a lawsuit filed against Costa-Gavras and Universal Pictures's (then) parent company MCA by former ambassador Nathaniel Davis and two others for libel.

[9] Roger Ebert gave the film three stars, writing that while the film was being cited for courage in criticism of the U.S. government, the criticism was clouded by its direction,[5] but the best scenes were where Lemmon and Spacek's character were bogged down by the embassy's "niceties" in their search:By the time Missing begins its crucial last half-hour, a strange thing has happened.

[10] In his 2015 Movie Guide, Leonard Maltin awarded Missing three and a half stars, highlighting Lemmon's acting and crediting Costa-Gavras as a skilled director.

[11] The film has a 94% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 32 reviews with the consensus: "Thanks in large part to strong performances from Sissy Spacek and Jack Lemmon, Missing is both a gripping character exploration and an effective political thriller.