New Release Thursday, May 21, 2026

Over 100 new titles landed on Relay this week. Here are 8 worth putting on tonight.

To Hell and Back: The Kane Hodder Story

Kane Hodder is the only actor who played Jason Voorhees more than once, but that’s barely the start of his story. Before the hockey mask, there was a Nevada childhood defined by relentless bullying and a stunt accident that burned more than half his body. Director Derek Dennis Herbert interviews Robert Englund, Bruce Campbell, and a roster of horror icons to build out the portrait, but the emotional center belongs entirely to Hodder. What emerges is less a genre retrospective than a survival story that horror just happens to live inside.

Documentary

Carts of Darkness

In North Vancouver, a group of homeless men race shopping carts down some of the city’s steepest hills, hitting speeds over 70 km/h with nothing but body weight to steer. Director Murray Siple used to make extreme sports films before a car accident left him a quadriplegic. His kinship with the men he’s filming is visible in every frame. It’s a National Film Board production that scored six Canadian Leo Award nominations, and it hasn’t lost any of its edge in the nearly two decades since.

Documentary

Mountains

Demolition worker Xavier spends his days tearing apart the Miami neighborhood his family has lived in for years, trying to save enough to move them somewhere better. Monica Sorelle shot her debut feature in Little Haiti with non-professional actors and real locations, earning a Special Jury Mention at Tribeca and the Independent Spirit Award for Someone to Watch. It’s a portrait of gentrification that refuses to editorialize, just lets a family exist against a backdrop that’s being erased in real time.

Drama

We Strangers

Rayelle cleans houses for a living. When a client asks if she’s psychic, she says yes. Inspired by writer-director Anu Valia’s own childhood in Gary, Indiana, We Strangers tracks what happens when the lie gives Rayelle a strange kind of power over the families who hire her, and the messages she invents start actually changing people’s lives. Kirby Howell-Baptiste plays her with exactly the right mix of comic timing and wariness. The film premiered at SXSW and won multiple awards at Hamptons International Film Festival.

Drama

Honeygiver Among the Dogs

An undercover detective in rural Bhutan is searching for a missing Buddhist nun. His only suspect is a woman the village calls a demoness. Dechen Roder’s debut feature, the first crime film made in Bhutan by one of the country’s few female directors, screened in the Panorama section at the Berlin International Film Festival and won the Special Jury Prize at Fribourg. “Buddhist noir” is exactly what it sounds like, and it is unlike anything else streaming right now.

Drama

Savage

New Zealand gang culture across three decades, told through one man’s life. Sam Kelly’s debut jumps between eras to show how Danny becomes Damage, the heavily tattooed enforcer of the Savages, while the friendship between him and gang leader Moses becomes the film’s real subject. Jake Ryan and John Tui hold it together with a naturalistic chemistry that reviewers specifically called out. Savage premiered at Busan and screened at the BFI London Film Festival, and it pulled 75% on Rotten Tomatoes from critics who don’t usually show up for this genre.

Crime

The King of Color

Lawrence Herbert grew up in Depression-era Brooklyn and spent his career in print and manufacturing during a time when color had no shared language. He invented one. The Pantone Matching System gave the entire design world a common reference for color, and at 96, Herbert sits down with director Patrick Creadon (who also made Wordplay and Hesburgh) to reflect on what that actually took. One interviewee in the film argues Herbert had more impact on daily modern life than Steve Jobs. It’s a credible argument.

Documentary

The Blob: A Genius Without a Brain

The blob is a single-cell organism, 600 million years old, with no brain, no nervous system, and no mouth. It can navigate a maze, learn to tolerate salt after repeated exposure, and distribute nutrients through its body with an efficiency that has infrastructure planners paying attention. When scientists at the Paris Zoo put one on display in 2019, it made international news. Director Jacques Mitsch mixes scientific research with animation and some genuine visual weirdness, producing the kind of film that makes you rethink what “intelligence” even means.

Documentary

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Streaming now on Relay.