(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Sun 1 March 2026 6:30, UK
There is quite a buzz around Send Help, the latest Sam Raimi film starring Rachel McAdams that released at the start of the month, and it’s definitely fair to say that, along with Chris Hemsworth’s Crime 101, it stands as one of the best movies released in 2026 so far.
The horror/comedy/thriller sees former teen heartthrob Dylan O’Brien as a philandering, misogynistic boss who winds up marooned alongside McAdams after a plane crash proved something of a surprise hit despite being released in the traditional dead zone for studios, and easily doubled its budget at the box office.
McAdams has garnered particular praise for her fully committed performance as a company strategist turned desperate survivalist, and it marks a bit of a mini-comeback for the Canadian actor who, before the call from Raimi, had only made two movies in the past six years, including the Marvel blockbuster sequel Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness alongside Benedict Cumberbatch.
But then she was probably entitled to a break after 20 years of filmmaking, across which she’s become one of the highest-grossing actresses around, bringing in more than $3billion and including a film that has gone down as one of the most popular in history, albeit for a certain ‘drinking hot chocolate on the sofa crying under a duvet’ demographic in the form of the 2004 weepy The Notebook.
It was a breakthrough role for both McAdams and her fellow Canadian Ryan Gosling, and despite some mixed reviews made a lot of money on release, with the film going on to be seen as one of the most romantic of this century. It saw Gosling becoming one of the biggest film stars in the world and McAdams picking up major franchises like Robert Downey Jr’s Sherlock Holmes, and winning an Oscar nomination for 2015’s exposé film Spotlight.
Recently, she was accosted by the Letterboxd team and asked to name her four favourite films, and her choices reflect her own love of a large-scale, tear-soaked drama of yesteryear. First up, “because I’m Canadian”, she went with the mid-’80s TV movie Anne of Green Gables, revealing she had watched the film “100,000 times”.
Next, she went with a bona fide classic, saying, “I love Elizabeth Taylor’s Giant with James Dean and Rock Hudson, that made me cry”. Giant is a true Hollywood epic, nominated for nine Academy Awards and winning one for George Stevens as ‘Best Director’, presenting a sprawling story of a Texas cattle ranger and his family; it was Dean’s final film, and he died in a car crash before it was released.
Thirdly, McAdams picked out one of the most enduring and best-loved musicals in history, 1965’s The Sound of Music, starring Julie Andrews, which brought in a quarter of a billion dollars at the box office, won five Oscars and spawned a soundtrack album that stayed in the US Billboard top 200 for more than four years.
Lastly, she picked a 1980s fantasy comedy by the late Rob Reiner that continues to be massively popular almost 40 years after its release, The Princess Bride, starring big names like Billy Crystal and Peter Cook, and although it wasn’t an initial success, the movie is regularly named as one of the funniest of all time.
Rachel McAdams’ four favourite films:
- Anne of Green Gables (Kevin Sullivan, 1985)
- Giant (George Stevens, 1956)
- The Sound of Music (Robert Wise, 1965)
- The Princess Bride (Rob Reiner, 1987)
