Arthur Miller's high-school-syllabus staple comes to frenzied life on the big screen, thanks largely to the directorial verve and vertiginous camera of Nicholas Hytner (The Madness of King George) and many top-notch performances. Daniel Day-Lewis musters an especially rough-hewn appeal as John Proctor, the last upright man in 1692 Salem, and Winona Ryder is unusually spooky as Abigail Williams, the girl who cries "Witch!" because her former lover, the married Proctor, jilted her. Also fine are Paul Scofield, as the coolly ambitious inquisitor (his imperious line readings are worth the ticket price), and Joan Allen as Proctor's chilly wife (after Ethan Frome and Nixon, I'd say she's being typecast).

Despite a killer opening sequence not in the play -- a wild but silly pseudo-pagan ritual performed by a group of boy-crazy teenage girls that awakens both libidos and the forces of Puritan repression at once -- the film is a slog at first. Eventually, the accusations of witchcraft reach a level of Pythonesque absurdity, and the movie is off and running, viewers surely aboil with righteous indignation. Shot on Hog Island, Hytner's adaptation (scripted by Miller) makes 1692 Salem palpably real, liberating the text from its overt parallels to the anti-Communist witch hunts of the 1950s and making the story seem a more universal indictment of conformist paranoia. A few choice lines suggest that we always think we've learned from the mistakes of the past, and we're always wrong. At the Nickelodeon, the Harvard Square, and the Chestnut Hill and in the suburbs.