New Release Thursday, July 9, 2026

Over 78 new titles landed on Relay this week. Here are seven worth clearing your Thursday night for.

Turning the Paige

Paige Niemann went viral for looking like Ariana Grande, and the internet never let her forget it. Turning the Paige follows what happens after millions of strangers decide who you're supposed to be. The documentary leans into a direct message Ariana herself sent Paige back in 2019, telling her she was beautiful without trying to look like anyone else, a message that resurfaced online this week and reopened the whole conversation all over again. Watch it for the parts where Paige stops performing the comparison and starts building something that's actually hers.

Reality Show

Joan

Sophie Turner plays the real Joan Hannington, a desperate single mother who talks her way out of a battered marriage and into becoming one of Britain's most successful jewel thieves. Set in 1985 London, the six-episode limited series never lets the crime overshadow the actual stakes, whether Joan gets to keep her daughter. It's the best kind of true story, stranger and messier than fiction would allow itself to be.

Drama

Sinners' Holiday

Sinners' Holiday hides a piece of film history inside a boardwalk crime melodrama. This is James Cagney's screen debut, and you can already see the coiled energy that would define his whole career for the next four decades. Ma Delano runs a penny arcade over a Coney Island bootlegging operation, and when an accidental killing threatens to expose her family, the whole thing unravels in a single tense night. The New York Times singled out Cagney's performance when the film opened in 1930, and nearly a century later it still holds up as the moment a legend showed up on screen for the first time.

Crime

Smartypants

Smartypants takes a simple premise and refuses to let it go. Comedians build genuinely researched PowerPoint presentations on completely ridiculous topics, then defend them like doctoral theses. Host Rekha Shankar keeps a straight face while guests like Paul F. Tompkins argue their case with real conviction, slides and all. It's the kind of show that works fine as background noise until someone commits so hard to a bit about, say, why vegetables aren't real that you have to stop what you're doing and actually watch.

Comedy

77 Minutes

77 Minutes never says the name of the man who walked into a San Ysidro McDonald's in July 1984 and opened fire. Director Charlie Minn, who has built a body of work around American mass shootings, keeps the camera on the people who lived through it instead, and on the seventy-seven minutes it took police to end what was, at the time, the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history. It is a hard watch. It earns that difficulty by refusing to look away from what the day actually cost.

Documentary

Queens of the Qing Dynasty

Queens of the Qing Dynasty premiered at the Berlin Film Festival before making its way to Toronto, then picked up three wins at the Atlantic Film Festival, including one for lead Sarah Walker's performance. The film follows a neurodivergent teen in a remote small town hospital and the international student volunteering there who becomes her unlikely closest friend. It is a quiet, strange, specific kind of movie, the sort critics keep bringing up long after the festival circuit has moved on to the next thing.

Drama

Thomas Sowell: Common Sense in a Senseless World

Thomas Sowell: Common Sense in a Senseless World follows Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley back to the Harlem library where Sowell's intellectual life actually started, long before Hoover Institution fellowships and a bibliography most academics would need two lifetimes to match. Riley talks to the people who knew Sowell best to explain why a notoriously private economist is still called one of the sharpest minds of the last fifty years, even by people who don't agree with him on much else.

Documentary

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Streaming now on Relay.