I was feeling fairly revved

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I was feeling fairly revved about Rachel McAdams after seeing her in The Wedding Crashers in July, and now, after catching her in Red Eye, I'm starting to realize that she's really quite the comer, and I may be putting it too cautiously. She's probably the fetching-est actress to come along since...I was going to say Reese Witherspoon but she's a lot more subtle and far more intriguing than Witherspoon and, for that matter, Julia Roberts when she was good (before the calendar and motherhood and everything else caught up with her). It has seemed for a long time that every actress playing a woman-in-peril uses a lot of the same moves. It's always primarily about what they're feeling (fear, anxiety) and all that oh-my-God shrieking and heavy panting, and never that much about what they're thinking or plotting in order to get back at the bad guy. This is McAdams in Red Eye -- she's emotional and vulnerable, but she never screams or crumples or goes nuts, and she's thinking all the time...waiting, watching, calculating. She's got something else going on. In her Red Eye review, Manohla Dargis said, "If you don't look too closely, if you fail to see past the lissome figure and the dimples that punctuate her smile, you might not notice how [McAdams] holds her gaze a few beats longer than need be, suggesting a depth of intensity uncommon in most Hollywood ingenues."

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