New Release Thursday, April 23, 2026

Over 100 new titles landed on Relay this week. Here are nine worth clearing your Thursday night for.

To Catch a Killer (1992)

John Wayne Gacy threw neighborhood cookouts. He ran charity fundraisers. He dressed as Pogo the Clown at children's birthday parties. He buried 33 young men under his house.

This 1992 miniseries isn't interested in horror as spectacle. Director Eric Till keeps the camera on Brian Dennehy, and Dennehy doesn't play a monster. He plays a glad-handing, backslapping, put-his-arm-around-you Midwestern contractor who happens to have murdered dozens of people. That gap is the whole movie. The Emmy nomination was deserved.

The film zeroes in on a ten-day window in December 1978, when Detective Joe Kozenczak started pulling a thread that unraveled everything. Margot Kidder and Meg Foster round out a cast that punches well above TV-movie weight class.

Drama

Ice Cream Man (1995)

Poor Gregory. After his stint at the Wishing Well Sanatorium, all he wants is to make the children happy.

This is the rare direct-to-video slasher where the three-day screenplay was co-written by David Dobkin, who later directed The Wedding Crashers. The cast somehow includes Olivia Hussey (Juliet in Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet), David Warner (The Omen), and Jan-Michael Vincent. All of them cashed the check and showed up. None of them are the star. The star is Clint Howard, who screamed at the top of his lungs in his car every morning before set to maintain the character's raspy, unhinged delivery. It worked.

Joe Bob Briggs hosted it on MonsterVision. Vinegar Syndrome gave it a proper Blu-ray restoration. A sequel is reportedly in development. Gregory is not done.

Horror

The Last Roman, Part One (1968)

Robert Siodmak directed The Killers in 1946. Burt Lancaster's debut. Ava Gardner's breakout. An Oscar nomination for directing. He was one of the supreme noir directors in Hollywood history.

This was his last film. Made at 68, in Romania and Berlin, with a cast that included Orson Welles, Laurence Harvey, Honor Blackman (Pussy Galore from Goldfinger), and Harriet Andersson, Ingmar Bergman's leading lady from Through a Glass Darkly. Siodmak wrote a letter to producer Artur Brauner during filming expressing doubts about the screenplay. He made it anyway. It was his final directorial credit. Score by Riz Ortolani.

The story is the fall of the Western Roman Empire, early 500s AD, with Harvey as a Roman noble playing Byzantine emperor Justinian (Welles) and Ostrogoth warlords against each other.

Action/Adventure

Reserve Notes (2015)

Three small-time Brooklyn hustlers rob two Jamaican drug dealers. The dealers work for an Italian mob boss. That is the entire setup, and it is enough.

Writer-director-producer Diemiruaye Deniran made this himself in Brooklyn, on a micro-budget, without the industry's involvement. The classic noir mechanics are all there: small people make a decision that pulls them into a machine far larger than themselves. The specificity of the geography, the particular food chain from street-level dealers up to organized crime, feels earned. It runs nearly two hours and earns the runtime.

Crime

The Sleeping Car Killer (1965)

Costa-Gavras went on to make Z, the political thriller that won Best Foreign Film at the Oscars in 1969, then Missing (Palme d'Or, 1982). He is one of the most important political filmmakers of the 20th century.

This was his first film, and there is no politics in it at all.

A woman is found murdered in a sleeping compartment on the overnight train from Marseilles to Paris. Inspector Grazziani, played by Yves Montand against his usual romantic-lead type, races to interview the other passengers before they start dying. Costa-Gavras uses POV cameras, internal monologues, a murder filmed entirely from the victim's perspective as the camera crashes to the floor. MUBI critics have argued it predates and influenced the entire giallo genre. Argento was still four years from his debut.

The cast: Montand, Simone Signoret alongside her real-life daughter Catherine Allégret, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Michel Piccoli. For a B-movie thriller.

Mystery

August at Akiko's (2018)

Alex Zhang Hungtai spent years making lo-fi cassette music under the name Dirty Beaches, got long-listed for the Polaris Prize, then retired the project entirely, moved to free jazz, and showed up in Twin Peaks: The Return.

Then he came to Hawaii.

This film is 75 minutes. A musician returns to the Big Island looking for the house he grew up in. He can't find it. He ends up at a small Buddhist bed and breakfast run by a woman named Akiko and simply stays. Nothing much happens, in the best possible way. Richard Brody at The New Yorker named it one of the best films of 2019. Variety called it "a soul-deep love letter to a state that Hollywood tends to more glibly romanticize." Director Christopher Makoto Yogi's next film, I Was a Simple Man, premiered at Sundance. This is where he started.

Drama

The Mystery of Mr. Wong (1939)

The second of five Mr. Wong detective pictures Boris Karloff made for Monogram Pictures between 1938 and 1940. Poverty-row budgets, quick turnaround, yellowface casting that was standard practice for the era and exactly what it looks like now.

What Karloff refused to do was a phony accent. He played Wong in his own rich velvet baritone, and the character was written as intelligent, Yale-educated, and cultured. That was better than most fictional Chinese detectives were getting in 1939. The MacGuffin this time is a stolen sapphire called the Eye of the Daughter of the Moon. It earns its name.

The sixth and final film in the series, Phantom of Chinatown, cast Chinese-American actor Keye Luke as the lead instead of Karloff. It was the first American sound film to put an Asian actor in an Asian detective lead role. Exhibitors lost interest without Karloff. The series ended after one film with Luke. That tells you everything about 1940 Hollywood.

Crime

Dry Blood (2019)

Clint Carney wrote the screenplay, plays the lead, and his band SYSTEM SYN composed the score. Director Kelton Jones also co-stars as the deranged sheriff who may or may not exist. The cinematographer appears in a supporting role alongside his wife.

Brian Barnes is trying to get clean at a remote mountain cabin. The withdrawal distorts his grip on what is real. Bodies appear. The sheriff gets strange. The film refuses to tell you cleanly which version of events is the true one until the final act, then recontextualizes everything. Practical gore effects drew consistent praise from reviewers who otherwise had mixed takes. Five festival awards in 2017. The IMDB score undersells it.

Horror

39 Days to Paradise (2025)

Four friends rowed 4,800 kilometers across the Pacific Ocean. Their boat was named Goodbye My Rudder, after the James Blunt song "Goodbye My Lover." One of the rowers is Blunt's cousin. Near the end of the expedition, a massive storm nearly tore the rudder off the boat.

They left California into 30-to-40-foot swells. A cargo tanker nearly ran them down around day 12. They deployed their sea anchor three times in the worst storms, sitting motionless in the water for hours while the ocean threw itself at them. The expedition raised £130,000 for ocean conservation and the Invictus Games Foundation. They made it to Hawaii in 39 days.

Director Paris Norriss was also one of the four rowers. He was also filming the whole time. The film is 28 minutes. It uses every one of them.

Action/Adventure

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