Kent Jones is good at showing why people need attention, even when they know better than to seek it. We value his patience with actors; his sympathy is less useful when it stops him asking harder questions.
Fi1m perspective
In Late Fame (2026), Willem Dafoe plays the rediscovered poet Ed Saxberger with a composure that makes his need for attention all the more touching. Kent Jones gives that need time and takes it seriously. We rate him as a patient director of actors, alert to feelings that might seem too small to build a film around. His weakness is apparent in the same film: he is reluctant to press its pretentious young writers much beyond their affectations.
Before fiction, Jones made documentaries about filmmakers, including A Letter to Elia (2010), co-directed with Martin Scorsese. In Hitchcock/Truffaut (2015), he brought recordings of the 1962 interviews together with commentary from contemporary directors. For his first narrative feature, Diane (2018), he worked with Mary Kay Place on a drama of family obligation and small-town life. With Late Fame, he moved from family obligation to the need for artistic recognition.
Greta Lee’s Gloria, an actress in Late Fame, is more theatrical than Dafoe’s Ed, and Jones lets the contrast be funny. We felt for Gloria, because Lee makes the work of keeping herself memorable look tiring. Jones allows her to be tiresome and still deserve our concern. With screenwriter Samy Burch, he finds a recognisable reason for her self-presentation: calling oneself an artist can offer a place among other people. The comedy works because there is something at stake for her beyond looking ridiculous.
Burch is less successful at distinguishing the younger writers from one another, and Jones’s sympathetic direction does not solve that problem. Their wish to be artists too often supplies the whole character. We understand Ed’s need for the group far better than we understand its need for him. We wanted Burch and Jones to be more specific about that, without making the younger writers any less deserving of sympathy. Start with Late Fame for Dafoe and Lee, and allow for a director who sometimes gives his characters an easier time than they need.
Biography
Kent Jones is an American film critic, programmer and director. He served as artistic director of the New York Film Festival from 2013 to 2019 and has written extensively on cinema.
Jones has collaborated with Martin Scorsese on documentaries including A Letter to Elia (2010) and contributed to My Voyage to Italy (1999). He directed the documentary Hitchcock/Truffaut (2015) and co-wrote Arnaud Desplechin’s Jimmy P. (2013). His narrative features are Diane (2018) and Late Fame (2025), the latter an adaptation of an Arthur Schnitzler novella written by Samy Burch and starring Willem Dafoe.
