Veteran production designer Sophie Jarvis’s assured feature debut Until Branches Bend is one smartly executed, unexpected gem. Premiering in the Discovery section of this year’s TIFF, the psychological drama (really a contemporary horror film) follows a cannery worker named Robin (2016 TIFF Rising Star Grace Glowicki) whose life is upended after discovering a creepy bug in a peach while (conveniently) alone at break time. Unable to get her boss to take the very real threat of a catastrophic invasion seriously — and perhaps risk a factory shutdown — she decides to go public with her unappetizing finding, which entails sounding […]

One of the great independent film discoveries of SXSW 2019 is a picture that is also one of the boldest artistic statements of year, Grace Glowicki’s Tito. The Canadian actor and director is known to Filmmaker readers as the female lead of 2016 25 New Face Ben Petrie’s Her Friend Adam, which I dubbed in these pages “a squirmy treatise on sexual insecurity and relationship oneupmanship.” Glowicki’s character’s response to her partner’s icky jealousy, I wrote, is one of “unrivaled power and blistering sexual humiliation, capped off by a loudly feigned orgasm that will erase in viewers any memory of […]