Latest news with #DavidMackenzie
Sydney Morning Herald
11 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
This film's ending makes no sense – but it isn't a complete write-off
RELAY ★★★½ (M) 112 minutes The Scottish director David Mackenzie (Hell or High Water) remains underrated, partly because he avoids making the same film twice. Still, there are recurring traits. One is a preference for cool colours: Relay, set in New York, is designed largely in shades of sea-blue, evoking both a pervasive loneliness and a sense that emotion of any sort needs to be submerged. Nothing is obtrusively stylised: it's just a matter of taking care with the look of an outfit or a computer monitor or a knick-knack on a windowsill, ensuring that everything fits the tone of romantic melancholy. Relay is billed as a thriller, but works best as a study of isolation: the main characters are kept apart for most of the running time, but seemingly have no one to turn to for support apart from each other. True, the hero Ash (Riz Ahmed), who goes by several other names, is a regular presence at AA meetings, one of the more cliched devices in Justin Piasecki's script. But he's reluctant to talk about himself even to sympathetic listeners – and anyway he doesn't have the freedom to discuss his current job, which by its nature has to remain under the radar, like the assassination trade in John Wick but a lot less glamorous. His employers are the Tri-State Relay Service, outwardly a perfectly innocent way for deaf people to make phone calls, but also a means to convey clandestine messages while remaining anonymous, at a very high price. Acting as a middleman between the interested parties, Ash types messages into an ancient-looking gadget, which an operator elsewhere passes on verbally (it's less complicated than it sounds). Sarah (Lily James), the latest client of the service, is a biotech scientist in possession of evidence of serious unethical conduct on the part of her former employers. Having been subjected to a campaign of harassment and intimidation, she declares herself willing to cut her losses, hand back the documents and get on with her life. But to do this safely she needs Ash, whose abilities extend to helping her evade the team that has her under surveillance (led by Sam Worthington, more effective as a gruff villain than he tends to be in hero mode). Before long he too is following her at a distance, adopting various disguises and using some neat ruses to throw her adversaries off the trail.
The Age
11 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Age
This film's ending makes no sense – but it isn't a complete write-off
RELAY ★★★½ (M) 112 minutes The Scottish director David Mackenzie (Hell or High Water) remains underrated, partly because he avoids making the same film twice. Still, there are recurring traits. One is a preference for cool colours: Relay, set in New York, is designed largely in shades of sea-blue, evoking both a pervasive loneliness and a sense that emotion of any sort needs to be submerged. Nothing is obtrusively stylised: it's just a matter of taking care with the look of an outfit or a computer monitor or a knick-knack on a windowsill, ensuring that everything fits the tone of romantic melancholy. Relay is billed as a thriller, but works best as a study of isolation: the main characters are kept apart for most of the running time, but seemingly have no one to turn to for support apart from each other. True, the hero Ash (Riz Ahmed), who goes by several other names, is a regular presence at AA meetings, one of the more cliched devices in Justin Piasecki's script. But he's reluctant to talk about himself even to sympathetic listeners – and anyway he doesn't have the freedom to discuss his current job, which by its nature has to remain under the radar, like the assassination trade in John Wick but a lot less glamorous. His employers are the Tri-State Relay Service, outwardly a perfectly innocent way for deaf people to make phone calls, but also a means to convey clandestine messages while remaining anonymous, at a very high price. Acting as a middleman between the interested parties, Ash types messages into an ancient-looking gadget, which an operator elsewhere passes on verbally (it's less complicated than it sounds). Sarah (Lily James), the latest client of the service, is a biotech scientist in possession of evidence of serious unethical conduct on the part of her former employers. Having been subjected to a campaign of harassment and intimidation, she declares herself willing to cut her losses, hand back the documents and get on with her life. But to do this safely she needs Ash, whose abilities extend to helping her evade the team that has her under surveillance (led by Sam Worthington, more effective as a gruff villain than he tends to be in hero mode). Before long he too is following her at a distance, adopting various disguises and using some neat ruses to throw her adversaries off the trail.
Globe and Mail
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Globe and Mail
Old-school ‘fixer' thriller Relay suffers from a new-school twist that not even Riz Ahmed can solve
Relay Directed by David Mackenzie Written by Justin Piasecki Starring Riz Ahmed, Lily James and Sam Worthington Classification 14A; 112 minutes Opens in theatres Aug. 22 If you are going to make a movie about a 'fixer' – those shadowy figures who are called into action in the dead of night to clean up all manner of filthy messes that the cops won't or shouldn't touch – then you had better ensure that your film isn't in need of its own fix. Blessedly, the cinematic ratio has so far been on the fixer's side, with such classics as Michael Clayton, Killing Them Softly and Pulp Fiction (at least the scenes featuring Harvey 'Mr. Wolf' Keitel) finding immense pleasures in watching smooth talkers untangle impossibly knotty affairs. But then you get duds like last year's Wolfs, a middle-of-the-pack diversion that even professional onscreen fixers George Clooney and Brad Pitt couldn't save. And then there's Relay. After premiering at last year's Toronto International Film Festival to a muted response, director David Mackenzie's corporate-espionage flick has finally slipped onto screens in the dog days of summer, a sleepy debut that even the sloppiest fixer would cry foul over. Not that the film's Manhattan fixer Ash (Riz Ahmed) is one to raise his voice, or say anything at all. In the film's one big burst of creativity, Ash's highly-priced services are arranged strictly through a telephone relay system, an old-school service that's used by those with a hearing or speech disability to make and receive calls by text, with the assistance of interchangeable operators. Unlike traditional calls, texts or e-mails, the messages – which Ash types out using a clunky device that resembles an answering machine crossed with a typewriter – cannot be traced or subpoenaed, allowing complete anonymity. TIFF speaker series to include Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds What does Spike Lee need from Denzel Washington on their fifth go-round? 'The key word is trust' This method comes in especially handy when Ash takes on a client named Sarah (Lily James), a pharmaceutical-industry scientist who is on the run from a hit squad hired by her former bosses (led by an amusingly, and perpetually, angry Sam Worthington). As Ash guides Sarah to safety, and sends her pursuers on one wild goose chase after another, there is no small amount of fun to be had in watching next-generation goons get fooled by such dang-near-analogue tech. Initially, Mackenzie also seems to be having a ball playing in the same grey space – both morally and aesthetically – as Michael Clayton's Tony Gilroy, with Relay finding quiet, sleek menace in the margins of a boardroom or the back of an anonymous surveillance van. And there is a distinct pleasure in watching the director (best known for the 2016 drama Hell or High Water) put Ahmed's character through the palm-sweat paces, forcing the fixer to gradually lose his cool and embrace a jittery kind of high-stakes anxiety. But as nice as it is to see New York play itself or watch Ahmed and Worthington run circles around each other, the entire caper is rendered unsolvable by one big, meatheaded twist that undermines everything that came before. And not in a, 'Jeez, I better rewatch this movie to see how the filmmakers possibly pulled it off!' way, either. More as in, 'Wow, not a single scene of this film now makes emotional or narrative sense.' Perhaps realizing that they have broken the laws of logic, Mackenzie and his screenwriter, Justin Piasecki, proceed to turn Ash into a Jason Bourne-like one-man wrecking ball, a move that can only be appreciated by those few poor souls who remember when Ahmed played, essentially, another fixer's mark in the fifth Bourne film. Quick, someone call Jason. Or Michael Clayton. I guess any of the Ocean's boys will do.
Time of India
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Relay Movie: Showtimes, Review, Songs, Trailer, Posters, News & Videos
× Would you like to review this movie? 3000 characters left Synopsis Relay is an upcoming English movie scheduled to be released on 22 Aug, 2025. The movie is directed by David Mackenzie and will feature Riz Ahmed, Lily James and Sam Worthington as lead characters. Cast & Crew
Geek Tyrant
07-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Geek Tyrant
Riz Ahmed and Lily James Get Tangled in High-Stakes Corporate Deceit in Trailer for RELAY — GeekTyrant
If you're into slick paranoia and morally flexible characters, Relay might be your next cinematic fix. Bleecker Street released the trailer for the corporate thriller directed by David Mackenzie ( Hell or High Water ), and it's serving up sharp tension with a side of moral rot. Riz Ahmed plays Tom, a master 'fixer' who orchestrates payouts between shady corporations and the people trying to blow the whistle on them. His anonymity is sacred. His rules are gospel. Then Lily James enters the picture as a desperate client running for her life, and suddenly all those carefully drawn lines start to blur. The synopsis reads: 'Riz Ahmed stars as a world class 'fixer' who specializes in brokering lucrative payoffs between corrupt corporations and individuals who threaten their ruin. He keeps his identity a secret through meticulous planning & always follows an exacting set of rules. But when a message arrives one day from a potential client (Lily James) needing his protection just to stay alive, all his rules quickly start to change.' The trailer gives off serious Michael Clayton meets Enemy of the State energy as it's the kind of story that gives the sense that nobody's in control. TIFF described the film as 'riddled with ingenious feats of misdirection, novel set pieces, and jaw-dropping twists that would have made Hitchcock proud.' The movie also stars Sam Worthington, Willa Fitzgerald, and Matthew Maher. It's set to hit theaters on August 22, 2025.
