Sarah’s been in lots of great films in a variety of roles, genres, timbres and holds a tenacity and intrepid place in the Hollywood landscape.  We’re doing a regularly updated series of reviews of all her films and hope to include her new films which are coming out around the corner.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer:  not a film (of course) but truly a powerful series about a teenage girl who has special powers and is guided by a father figure school librarian to fight evil demons and monsters.  With special friends some with powers and some without, she vanquishes evil while looking beautiful.  A hard task for mere mortals yet Sarah carries the deconstructed discourse of the teenage American living teenage dramas alongside an important quest for which she is never rewarded for.  A kind of martyrdom, religious symbols and myth blend with the modern.  The irony that the girl who is small and weak, unpopular and in some ways a social outcast is the very foundation of the world, the female patriarch in Jewish mythology, weak in her wishes to be ordinary, yet consumed by the need of protecting the world.  What is Buffy’s motivation in this piece?  This is the complex question underpinning the central hero epic story that is expansive over many series of many episodes.  As grand in scale as the Illiyad it plots Buffy’s journey to adulthood between Scylla and Charibus.

Harvard Man:  beginning with an exciting and very pulse raising sex scene this film may have been the one to catapult Sarah into sex symbol status gracing magazine covers and doing the talk show circuit.  A slightly removed feel as if somehow this down to earth college drama where Sarah plays the spoilt yet uncompromising daughter of a rich mob boss who has a poor and needy boyfriend (who himself is having it off with his bisexual lesbian lecturer).  Steamy scenes indeed and with Sarah in it that is not surprising.  The story takes twists and turns showing a world of high academia alongside the complexity of inequality in modern day America, the injustice of the robber-baron against the wholesome desire of the upwardly mobile and aspiring young person cut down from their hope by tragic circumstance.  Is the question in this film that riches provide everything or is the question that caring loses everything?  The greed of Sarah’s character in the film proves her undoing whilst the story moves on in a truly inspiring American way of the archetype of the ‘trickster knave’ (Sarah’s boyfriend) alongside the lady Macbeth of Sarah’s character.