Rachel McAdams: Top Five / Bottom One

She’s one of the best young actresses working today, and she’s even been fortunate enough — or smart enough — not to have ended up in many bad projects merely for the work. (And her new flick, Morning Glory, continues that trend.) Rachel McAdams, thank you for making it impossible to pick out five bad movies you’re connected with, and hard to narrow it down to five good ones.

Top Five

Slings and Arrows: Season 1
A must-see all around, this Canadian TV series about a theater company features, in its first season, McAdams as a young actress getting her first break in a production of Hamlet.

Red Eye
Cillian Murphy holds McAdams hostage on a commercial airline flight, and no one else ever even knows it’s happening. It works, in part, thanks to McAdams’ intensely believable everywoman performance.

State of Play
McAdams is a hotshot blogger forced to contend with old-school newspaper journo Russell Crowe: together, they solve mysteries! It’s pretty awesome, actually.

The Time Traveler’s Wife
It’s not as good as the book — what is? — but McAdams brings a tender vulnerability to a woman in love with a man (Eric Bana) who bounces around in time in ways he has no control over. And you thought you never knew when your husband was coming home…

Sherlock Holmes
Few women could serve as a romantic foil for the notorious misanthrope Sherlock Holmes, and few actresses could stand up to Robert Downey Jr.‘s imperiousness; McAdams pulls it off.

Bottom One

The Notebook
It’s not McAdams’ fault that this movie is the pits — her performance is as fine as always — but even she (and her excellent co-star, Ryan Gosling) cannot make the marathon levels of sappiness tolerable in this excruciatingly banal romance.

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MaryAnn Johanson suffers the slings and arrows of outrageous criticism at FlickFilosopher.com. (email me)

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