Willem Dafoe's 'Late Fame' and Two 2026 Poet Films, Read by a Critic

Willem Dafoe plays Ed Saxberger, a forgotten New York School poet (a loose New York verse circle of the 1950s and '60s), pulled back into writing by young fans, in Kent Jones's Late Fame. The film adapts Arthur Schnitzler's late-nineteenth-century novella. It's one of three 2026 releases about verse reviewed this season by poet and critic Matt Longabucco.

The other two are Hong Sangsoo's What Does That Nature Say to You, with Ha Seongguk as Donghwa, a wedding videographer who reads his poems at his girlfriend's family home, and Simón Mesa Soto's A Poet (Un Poeta), with Ubeimar Rios as Oscar Restrepo, a Medellín poet reluctantly recruited to teach high school philosophy.

What keeps recurring across all three?

A poet reciting work the audience can't quite judge. "Films need familiar plots," Longabucco writes, "so the protagonists — all men — go searching for connection." Alcohol flows. Rivalries sting. Humiliations, he notes, "prove transformative" only sometimes; the rest are "swallowed like medicine." The poems on screen "aren't exactly amazing."

What's driving this small boom?

A present-tense anxiety about writing's standing. "The world's cynicism still surprises," Longabucco writes, "as who would have imagined the glee with which we'd lately be encouraged to banish writing and declare it obsolete." On screen, poets stand in for "the last artists who can't make money," carrying "a pressing and practical concern about old books and what's in them." They double, he argues, as proxies for their directors' "frustrations regarding the path of devotion and the specter of artistic failure."

Where does 'Late Fame' stumble most?

Jones's New York feels thin. The young acolytes "make speeches about the stultifying effects of technology, but continually sneak looks at their phones." Saxberger can't finish the new poem he promised; the film tries "a feverish ramble through Greenwich Village" and a voiceover of "seasons collide" on repeat. Longabucco calls the city "sterile and uncompelling" and its past "exhausted and wrung dry."

The reading scene saves part of the run. Saxberger dusts off an old poem from his forgotten book; "it's worlds better than everything else we hear," Longabucco writes. The film slips in a recorded reading of Schuyler's "Salute": "Past is past, and if one/remembers what one meant/to do and never did, is/not to have thought to do/enough…." The audience hears the verse lift the protagonist back to the moment of its writing.

Where does Hong land best?

Hong's film is the gentlest of the three. Donghwa reads a poem over soju. It doesn't land. His girlfriend's parents attack his ascetic principles after dinner. By morning, he's broken down on the highway calling for roadside assistance. Longabucco reads the finish as deliberate: Hong may feel "seen the same way by a public perhaps disenchanted or even annoyed by his steady chipping onward at a lifework" of about two films a year.

What does 'A Poet' capture about literary culture?

Mesa Soto catches the patronage economy (donors underwriting nonprofit literary centers and their programming). Oscar's rival Efrain, a successful novelist, coaches student Yurlady — played by Rebeca Andrade — "to start writing more about her poor upbringing and racial identity, the better to give the center's rich, white donors what they tacitly demand." She reads at a gala, drinks too much, and passes out. The center tries to weasel out of the fallout "simperingly." Longabucco calls the scene documentary.

Why don't they rival 'Peter Hujar's Day'?

Longabucco names Ira Sachs's 2025 biopic Peter Hujar's Day as the benchmark. It gives the photographer a single working day, with gossip, money worries, and projects "dwindling or cresting or inching forward." Hujar's posthumous reputation sits in the future tense. Most poet films, by contrast, project their subjects' pathos backward, freezing them in a single elegiac register.

What does the screen owe the page?

"The poets don't need the movies as much as the movies need characters who still have something unruly to lay on the line," Longabucco writes. The films he wants would treat the verse seriously and treat its makers as something more than archetypes. A genre that opened 2026 with three earnest entries may end the year facing a tougher question: can any working director make poetry on screen without first pinning it to a poster child of failure?