There are few portraits of fabulous privilege as knowing as Whit Stillman’s 1990 film Metropolitan, a slice-of-the-high-life dramedy about class and class acts. While home in New York for winter break after his first semester at Princeton, young Tom Townsend falls in with a posse of bon-mot-spewing intellectuals and pseudointellectuals calling themselves the Sally Fowler Rat Pack. Every night it’s a new dress ball or black-tie event, and then the group recuses themselves to Sally Fowler’s apartment to stay up through the wee small hours shooting the bull on life (money), the universe (Manhattan), and everything (a future of downward social mobility). Stillman’s supreme wit earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay, and an enduring following for this heady, pleasurable film.

In the 25 years since Metropolitan announced Stillman as a talent not to be ignored, he’s directed several more films and most recently turned to internet-TV, directing The Cosmopolitans at Amazon. He’s asserted himself as a vital voice in American independent cinema, and so to celebrate him as well as his debut film’s 25th anniversary, Metropolitan will soon see a theatrical rerelease across the country. As noted by Variety, the film will premiere at New York’s Film Society of Lincoln Center on August 7, with a screening in Los Angeles the week after. Rialto Pictures has also scheduled a national run of the film over the course of the late summer and fall.

Innumerable young cinephiles (myself included) were late to the game on Metropolitan, only coming to appreciate its unique charms long after the film had completed its initial theatrical run. This opportunity comes as a godsend to Stillman fans, and socioeconomic conditions in America have only enhanced the film’s satire in the years since its release. In our current age of one-percenters and the disappearing middle class, Stillman’s film has only taken on more relevancy. If it wasn’t for the fashion and the lo-fi videotape, some audiences might mistake it for a first-run film.