Sarah Polley

ACTRESS, DIRECTOR, WRITER

Sarah Polley Movies or Tv Shows (upto Mar 2024) - Watch Online

29th May 2022 | FlixCatalog Staff

Sarah Polley is an actress and director renowned in her native Canada for her political activism. Blessed with an extremely expressive face that enables directors to minimize dialog due to her uncanny ability to suggest a character's thoughts, Polley has become a favorite of critics for her sensitive portraits of wounded and conflicted young women in independent films.She was born into a show business family: her stepfather, Michael Polley, appeared with her in the movie Die Abenteuer des Baron Münchhausen (1988) and on the television series Avonlea - Das Mädchen aus der Stadt (1990); and her mother, Diane Polley, was an actress and casting director. It was her mother's connections that launched Sarah, at her own insistence, on an acting career at the age of four, following in the footsteps of her older half-brother Mark Polley. A second half-brother, John Buchan, is a casting director and producer.Her career as a child actress shifted into high gear when she was cast as the Cockney waif Jody Turner in Die Macht eines Kindes (1989), for which she won a Gemini Award, the Canadian equivalent of the Emmy, in 1992. Produced by Kevin Sullivan, the film was based on the book by Lucy Maud Montgomery, author of Anne auf Green Gables (1985). When Sullivan created a television series based on Montgomery's work, he cast Polley in the lead role of Sara Stanley in Avonlea - Das Mädchen aus der Stadt (1990). The series propelled Polley into the first rank of Canadian TV stars and made her independently wealthy by the age of fourteen.Her personal life was deeply affected by the death of her mother Diane from cancer shortly after her 11th birthday, a development that ironically paralleled the fictional life of her character Sara. Highly intelligent and politically progressive at a young age, Polley eventually rebelled against what she felt was the Americanization of the series after it was picked up by the Disney Channel for distribution in the US, eventually dropping out of the show. Though she does not blame her parents, she remains publicly disenchanted over the loss of her childhood and, in October 2003, said she is working on a script about a twelve-year-old girl on a TV show.Polley, who picked up a second Gemini Award for her performance in the TV series Straight Up (1996), subsequently quit acting and high school to turn her attention to politics, positioning herself on the extreme left of Canada's left-of-center New Democratic Party. The publicity ensuing from her losing some teeth after being slugged by an Ontario policeman during a protest against the Conservative provincial government, plus the stinging cynicism from some other activists unimpressed by her celebrity, led her to lower her political profile temporarily and return to acting in Atom Egoyan's film Das süße Jenseits (1997). It was her appearance as Nicole, the teenage girl injured in a school bus accident who serves as the conscience of the small town rent by the tragedy, that first brought her to the attention of critics in the US. In Canada, the role was heralded by critics as her successful breakthrough to adult roles. It was her second film with Egoyan, who wrote the part with her in mind when he adapted the novel by Russell Banks, who, ironically, is American. Predictions of an Academy Award nomination and future stardom were part of the critical consensus, and she received her first Best Actress Genie nomination from Canada's Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television and the Best Supporting Actress award from the Boston Society of Film Critics. It was the buzz created at the Sundance Festival, where her starring role in the film Guinevere (1999) was showcased, when the entertainment media crowned her the it-girl of 1999.Intensely private and extremely ambivalent about the personal cost of celebrity and the Hollywood ethos Fame is the Name of the Game, Polley could be seen as rebelling against the expectations of mainstream cinema when she embarked on a career path that took her out of the spotlight thrown by the harsh lights of the Hollywood hype/publicity machine after shooting the film Go! Das Leben beginnt erst um 3.00 Uhr morgens (1999). She dropped out of Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous - Fast berühmt (2000), the US$60 million mega-hyped vehicle that was supposed to make her a mainstream star in the US, choosing to return to Canada to make the CDN$1.5 million The Law of Enclosures (2000) for Genie Award-winner John Greyson, a director she admires greatly. The film grossed poorly in Canada and was not released in the US, but it did garner Polley her second Genie nomination for Best Actress. While her replacement in Almost Famous - Fast berühmt (2000) went on to win an Oscar nomination and a career above the title in glossy Hollywood films, she took a wide variety of parts, large and small, in independent films, including significant roles in the ensemble pieces Das Reich und die Herrlichkeit (2000) and Das Gewicht des Wassers (2000); bit parts in eXistenZ (1999) and Love Come Down (2000); and the lead in No Such Thing (2001). Her choice of projects showed her to be a questing spirit more focused on learning the art of her craft than on stardom.She has said that her choice of film roles, eschewing mainstream Hollywood movies for chancier, non-commercial independent fare, was the result of an ethical decision on her part to make films with social importance. A less-observant viewer might think that the rebel Polley played in her political life that had previously manifested itself in her profession was now driving her to the verge of career suicide in terms of popularity, marketability, and choice of future roles. However, that interpretation does not recognize the extraordinary talent that will always keep her in demand by directors, if not casting agents, with an eye on the opening weekend box office. One must understand Polley's career progression in light of her attendance at the Canadian Film Centre's directors program and her production of short films, including Don't Think Twice (1999) and the highly praised I Shout Love (2001). Polley is a cinema artist. This woman wants to make, and will make films. Thus, we can understand her career choices as a desire to work with and understand the technique of some of the best directors in film, including David Cronenberg, Michael Winterbottom, and Hal Hartley.Polley is as renowned for her intelligence as for her remarkable talent. The problem of the intelligent person in the acting field is that the actor, as artist, in not ultimately in control of their medium, and it is artistic control that is the hallmark of the great artist. The controlling intelligence on a movie set is the director, and her attendance at the Canadian Film Centre has given her a new perspective on acting. The actor, she says, should not try to give a complete performance for the camera (that is, control the representation on film) but must remember that the function of the actor is to give the director as much coverage as possible as a film, as well as a performance, is made in the editing room. According to Polley, this realization, that the film actor exists to serve the director, has given her new enthusiasm for acting. Thus, her career, and her career choices, can be seen as a quest for knowledge about the art of cinema, a journey whose fruition we will see in her future feature work as both actor and director. - IMDb Mini Biography By: Jon C. Hopwood

Fan Zone

Streaming Availability

Amazon Video has the most number of Sarah Polley’s flixes, followed by Vudu compared to other streaming platforms. See the full graph below.

Releases by Year

Sarah Polley on average has worked on 2 movies per year from 1988 to 2016. See the full graphs of the number of Sarah Polley movies released per year from 1999 till 2016.

Top Genres

Sarah Polley works mostly in Drama Genre followed by Comedy Genre flixes. 40% of Sarah Polley movies are Drama Genre movies. See Top Genres that Sarah Polley worked on in the graph below.

Average IMDB Score

On average the IMDB score of the movies that Sarah Polley has worked on is 6.9.

6.9 / 10

Sarah Polley's Movies and Tv Series available to Stream now ..

Biography,Drama,History
John Adams (2008)

The life of one of the USA's Founding Fathers, its second President, and his role in the nation's first 50 years.

8.5/1071 min

Available in 10 platform(s).

Drama,Fantasy,Romance
Mr. Nobody (2009)

A boy stands on a station platform as a train is about to leave. Should he go with his mother or stay with his father? Infinite possibilities arise from this decision. As long as he doesn't choose, anything is possible.

7.8/10141 min

Available in 16 platform(s).

A film that excavates layers of myth and memory to find the elusive truth at the core of a family of storytellers.

7.5/10108 min

Available in 14 platform(s).

A man coping with the institutionalization of his wife because of Alzheimer's disease faces an epiphany when she transfers her affections to another man, Aubrey, a wheelchair-bound mute who also is a patient at the nursing home.

7.5/10110 min

Available in 7 platform(s).

A bus crash in a small town brings a lawyer to the town to defend the families, but he discovers that everything is not what it seems.

7.5/10112 min

Available in 3 platform(s).

A hearing impaired factory worker gives up her first holiday in years and instead travels out to an oil rig, where she cares for a man suffering from severe burns.

7.4/10115 min

Available in 1 platform(s).

A nurse, a policeman, a young married couple, a salesman and other survivors of a worldwide plague that is producing aggressive, flesh-eating zombies, take refuge in a mega Midwestern shopping mall.

7.3/10101 min

Available in 10 platform(s).

Comedy,Crime
Go (1999)

The aftermath of a drug deal as told from three different points of view.

7.2/10102 min

Available in 10 platform(s).