America may no longer be looking for Reds under its beds but Arthur Miller's famous 1952 drama about a community torn apart by mass hysteria - his response to the era's anti-communist witch-hunts - hasn't lost any of its power or its relevance. Set in 1692, Miller's timeless tragedy opens with a teenage girl drinking a charm to kill her former lover's wife. The New England village of Salem is soon convulsed by accusations of witchcraft, but spite and superstition are at work - not the supernatural. Miller (in his role as screenwriter) and director Nicholas Hytner (maker of The Madness of King George) seem at times over-eager to open out the play's action for the screen, but the cast's conviction sees the film through. Winona Ryder is chillingly malevolent as the girl whose guilty desires unleash the terror, and Daniel Day-Lewis and Joan Allen are moving as the wronged husband and wife, but they cannot match the terrifying intensity of Paul Scofield as the Puritan judge whose determination to root out the Devil destroys the innocent.

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