New Release Thursday, July 30, 2026

Dozens of new titles landed on Relay this week. Here are six worth clearing your Thursday night for.

Fireworks Wednesday

Asghar Farhadi hadn't won an Oscar yet when he made this one. He was still a few years from A Separation, still working out the trick that would define his whole career: put ordinary people in one bad afternoon and let the truth come apart in pieces. A maid named Roohi takes a one-day job in a Tehran apartment, two days before her own wedding, and gets pulled into a marriage that's already on fire. The wife is convinced her husband is cheating with the neighbor. She wants Roohi to spy. Nobody in the building is who they claim to be, including, eventually, Roohi herself. The film took the Hugo at the Chicago International Film Festival years before most Western audiences knew Farhadi's name, and it still plays like the moment he figured out exactly what kind of filmmaker he was going to be.

Drama

Calvaire

A van breaks down outside a rural inn, and that is the last normal sentence you can write about this movie. Marc Stevens, a traveling lounge singer, gets taken in by an innkeeper whose wife left him years ago and never came back. The innkeeper decides Marc will do instead. What follows is one of the more unhinged descents in Belgian horror, screened in Cannes' Critics' Week before director Fabrice du Welz turned the same stretch of Ardennes forest into a loose trilogy of films about men doing terrible things to each other in the woods. Watch it on a night when you don't need to sleep well afterward.

Horror

Finding Hope

Andrew Daniels survives the accident that should have killed him. His wife doesn't come out of it so lucky. She wakes up without any memory of their marriage, and he's left trying to make a stranger fall in love with a man she already married once and can't remember choosing. It's a smaller, quieter film than the rest of this week's lineup, built around one question that keeps getting harder to answer the longer the movie sits with it: what do you actually owe someone who no longer remembers loving you back?

Drama

42 Years for Nothing

David Bryant was seventeen when police brought him in for questioning about the murder of an eight year old girl in his Bronx apartment building. He signed a confession he recanted within hours. He spent the next 38 years in prison saying the same thing over and over to anyone who would listen. Nobody did, until DNA testing on old evidence proved the semen found at the scene couldn't have come from him. A judge vacated his conviction in 2013. It took until 2018 for the courts to fully agree he'd told the truth the entire time. Director Lana Adams follows Bryant home, into a world that changed almost completely while he was gone, and the film sits with what it costs a person to be right for four decades and have it matter to no one.

Crime

Ashkal

A caretaker's body turns up burned in the middle of an unfinished luxury development in Carthage, the half-built towers rising out of dirt lots that were supposed to be Tunisia's post-revolution future. Two detectives investigate, and every answer they find opens onto a stranger question, until the case stops being about one death and starts being about the buildings themselves. Ashkal premiered at Cannes' Directors' Fortnight and went on to take the top prize at Fespaco, and it uses a police procedural as cover for something closer to a national ghost story, about a country still haunted by the promises made right after everything changed.

Thriller

The Marine Spirit: A Tale of the Mami Wata

Mami Wata has been a fixture of West African folklore for generations, a water spirit who can bless or ruin whoever she takes an interest in, depending on the story and who's telling it. This film says its version really happened. A young Nigerian couple gets pulled into her orbit, their marriage and their sanity both on the line, and the only thing that seems to hold her back is prayer. Director GuGu E. Michaels treats the folklore as fact rather than metaphor, which is what makes the whole thing land differently than a standard possession story. Somebody believed this.

Horror

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Streaming now on Relay.