They All Laughed (Peter Bogdanovich, 1981)

I've seen They All Laughed twice, and the second time felt as magical as the first even as I could better settle in and appreciate the delicate mastery of Bogdanovich's direction and the actors' perfectly timed performances. It's an exquisite delight of a film, so wistful and breezy that its fraught, tragic behind-the-scenes parallels are crowded out during the movie and blunted into more of a melancholy. Lumped with Heaven's Gate as one of the final nails in New Hollywood's coffin, but also like Heaven's Gate it shows the degree to which that method might still have taken things before blockbusters moved in to take over.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.