Late Fame opened in New York on August 7 via Magnolia Pictures. Its director, Kent Jones, spent seven years running the New York Film Festival and contributed to Cahiers du Cinéma and Film Comment before returning to fiction. This is his second narrative feature, following 2018's Diane.
The film adapts Arthur Schnitzler's 1895 novella, transposed by screenwriter Samy Burch from Vienna to present-day SoHo. Willem Dafoe plays Ed Saxberger, a retired postal worker who briefly published poetry in the late 1970s and had been largely forgotten since. When a group of young downtown artists, led by the generationally wealthy Meyers (Edmund Donovan), rediscovers him and anoints him a genius, Saxberger is drawn back into a world he had assumed closed. Greta Lee plays Gloria, the group's enigmatic center. The film runs 96 minutes, with cinematography by Wyatt Garfield.
Jones, speaking to MUBI Notebook, said he wanted "the film to be powered by the energy of the actors, and almost lit by their faces." On the SoHo setting: "It feels unchanged physically, but obviously completely changed in terms of who gets to live there."
The film premiered in the Orizzonti section of the 82nd Venice International Film Festival in August 2025, then screened at the New York Film Festival that September. It won the Der Standard Reader Jury Award at the Vienna International Film Festival. It holds a 90% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes across 52 reviews, with the consensus describing it as "a gentle rumination on art and authenticity."
Late Fame opens the same weekend as A24's Tony and Jane Schoenbrun's Camp Miasma, two Cannes titles with significant press. It arrives without that noise. It expands to Los Angeles on August 14.