Leading Ladies: August 2005
 Dreamworks |
Red EyeStars: Rachel McAdams, Cillian Murphy, Brian Cox Can it be? Two movies in the same week that draw almost unanimous positive reviews from the female critics? Seems so. The Leading Ladies give props to McAdams's performance and the skilled thriller director Craven in making Red Eye, about an innocent airline passenger who's dragged into an assassination plot, one of the summer's better action movies. Entertainment Weekly's Lisa Schwarzbaum says "a good measure of the movie's white-knuckle fun comes from Craven's old-hand familiarity with the way thrillers tick, predicated on the smallest and most banal of missed connections, the kind that get an audience to go crazy." The New York Times's Manohla Dargis says that "one of the ironies about the film is that its relatively small-movie feel allows Mr. Craven to focus on the sorts of things ‑- the performances and little bits of business from the extras ‑- that a director like Michael Bay doesn't have time for, partly because he is so busy blowing stuff up." Premiere's Sara Brady says "McAdams gives a gutsy performance that makes up for the 20 years Craven and his genre-mates have spent gleefully slaughtering promiscuous teenage girls onscreen," and the New York Daily News's Jami Bernard says that "this is a sophisticated genre movie, and it's effective on many levels ... [including] playing on our national squeamishness over the perils and inconvenience of post-9/11 air travel."Female consensus: Red Eye's a first-class hit
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