The Go-Between (1971)

Brilliantly evocative and resonant adaptation of L.P. Hartley’s 1953 novel, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter. Dominic Guard is Leo, the 12-year-old spending the summer of 1990 with the Maudsley family in their large Norfolk country house. He finds himself becoming a go-between for Marian Maudsley (Julie Christie) and Ted Burgess (Alan Bates), the local farmer she’s secretly having an affair with.

Like the book, it focuses on issues of social inequality. Marian’s affair transgresses class boundaries and is therefore taboo. It also probes into sexuality and how naive young Leo’s own consciousness of adult relationships is crippled by the way he is used to facilitate a union he cannot understand.

Julie Christie is excellent as the charming-but-manipulative Marian. Edward Fox is also strong as the posh-but-dull Hugh, unable to compete with the “savagery” of Ted.

The hot summer is expertly conveyed and you can feel the heat building to the inevitable storm that marks the climax. As child actors go, Guard is right up there (he was also in Picnic at Hanging Rock). The music, by Michel Legrand, is perfectly judged – sometimes lovely, often foreboding.

With the vivid way it’s shot and soundtracked, at times it has the feel of a horror film. But the horror turns out to be an emotional one. Rather than manifesting itself in sudden scares, it’s a terror that echoes down through the decades.

Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)

On Valentine’s Day, 1900, a bunch of girls from an Australian boarding school go on a day out to the ominous Hanging Rock. It soon becomes clear that there’s an essential wrongness about the place. Clocks stop at midday and, amid the heat, the girls enter a kind of disorientated enchantment. Seemingly bewitched and in a trance, three of them disappear (plus one of their teachers, played by Vivean Gray – Mrs. Mangel from Neighbours). I last saw this film at least 30 years ago but the utterly haunting image of the girls in their white dresses – walking, somehow mesmerised, towards a fate that is brilliantly never explained – has stayed with me ever since.

Like all of the world’s most terrifying stories, this adaptation of the Joan Lindsay novel understands that the less you explain the more scary it becomes. The film works on multiple levels. It’s a supernatural thriller but also a historical drama that takes on issues of class division, female repression and sexuality, and social control inside and outside of institutions.

The music by Gheorghe Zamfir (panpipe) and Marcel Cellier (organ) is especially effective and goes a long way towards building the atmosphere. Sophia Coppola's film The Virgin Suicides, which covers similar themes, had an oddly similar kind of soundtrack (by Air), so was presumably influenced by this film.

Peter Weir’s direction is stunning: it’s shot in a way that really enhances the sense of dazed, ethereal bewitchment.

A masterpiece.