An aging New York poet finds his lost collection in the hands of young admirers. Magnolia Pictures opens Late Fame on Friday.

Kent Jones spent years as a film critic and programmer, most recently as director of the New York Film Festival. His second feature, Late Fame, opens at Film Forum in New York on August 7 and in Los Angeles on August 14. Magnolia Pictures distributes.

The screenplay, written by Samy Burch, adapts Arthur Schnitzler's 1895 novella of the same name. Willem Dafoe plays Ed Saxberger, a poet who has spent years working in a post office, his old collection long out of print and unread. A circle of young New York artists finds the work, reads it, and decides he is a genius. Gloria, played by Greta Lee, is the most magnetic presence in that circle. The film turns on a single question: whether any of the attention means what Saxberger wants it to mean.

Christine Vachon and Pamela Koffler produce through Killer Films. Wyatt Garfield shot the picture.

Late Fame premiered in the Orizzonti section at Venice 2025 and won the Der Standard Reader Jury award at the 63rd Vienna International Film Festival. It holds an 88% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes from 32 reviews.

The film is quiet in the way that films about small artistic lives tend to be. That it's arriving with almost no noise around it is either a problem or the point.