Awards & Accolades

Retrograde

Grand Jury Honorable Mention: Best Breakout Feature, Slamdance Film Festival

Grand Jury Prize Nominee: Best Narrative Feature, Slamdance Film Festival

Clint Howard Character Actor Award for Molly Reisman, Sidewalk Film Festival

DGC Ontario Best Director Award for Adrian Murray, Canadian Film Festival

Withdrawn

Winner: Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature, Mammoth Lakes Film Festival

Press

Retrograde

“Played with a masterful deadpan by Reisman, Molly is touchingly unlikable — not in the showy ways now fashionable in movies about antiheroines, but in the pricklier, everyday ways that women are rarely allowed to be onscreen."
—The New York Times

“One of the strongest independent features of the year also has one of the simplest premises: Molly Richmond (Molly Reisman) is charged with reckless driving but every fiber of her being aims to fight it. Through a series of pitch-perfect, dryly hilarious, and ultimately soul-sucking interactions, the 74-minute gem charts Molly’s journey to fight the system to dispiriting ends."
—The Film Stage

“Molly Reisman shines in indie gem Retrograde”
—She Does The City

“For his second feature film, Canadian writer and director Adrian Murray tests the boundaries of just how mundane and ordinary a movie plot can be. Retrograde tediously follows an insufferable 20-something Toronto woman from the moment she's issued a traffic violation ticket to the matter's inane resolution. And it's kind of brilliant.”
—Exclaim!

“Perfectly encapsulating the pain and humor of being needlessly screwed over by bureaucrats, Retrograde is Kafka in miniature. Writer/director Adrian Murray impressively stages every scene in a single, elegant shot, with a precision that recalls the masters of the Romanian New Wave.”
—Wisconsin Film Festival

“Typically, the pursuit of justice in cinema is inextricably entangled with the crime thriller or mystery genres, but as much as we all may indulge in some of network television’s most rote (but entertaining) devices, their scenarios are sensationalized rather than relatable. Writer-director Adrian Murray inverts the formula in the perfectly calibrated Retrograde.”
—Tone Madison

“Retrograde is a classic buried indie treasure, a sharp portrait of a young woman who decides to fight that ticket with all her might to the detriment of almost every other aspect of her life, thus revealing that she is, in fact, a bit if an asshole.”
—AWFJ

Withdrawn

“Brimming with detail and character, it is dry in its wit, and thoroughly sincere [...] Murray and his small cast and crew of Ontario-based filmmakers have delivered one of the most affecting portraits of young adult life in a post-recession world."
—Screen Anarchy’s Top Slamdance Film Festival Picks

"Never before have I seen a film that more closely captures the mindset, emotions, and speech patterns of millennials than Adrian Murray’s Withdrawn."
—The Young Folks

“Murray’s film is a tiny scale gem of a picture, one that deserves every bit of praise it has received and this latest trailer catches the tone of it beautifully."
—Screen Anarchy

“A humorous and oblique examination of wasted space and wasted time.”
—SLUG Mag

“From trying to solve his Rubik’s cube to trying to hack into another’s credit card account, Aaron is a character for our time: lost, adrift, addicted to video games and Internet news.”
—Diversions LA

“Using a deceptively simple visual scheme that yields effectively comedic dividends, Withdrawn offers subtly poignant commentary on a lost generation struggling to connect.”
—LAFT USA

“So funny in a low key way. This is not hi-jinx. It’s not broad comedy. But it’s really smart, inventive filmmaking."
—MovieMaker Magazine: 2017 Slamdance Fest Preview