Khoi Vinh’s review published on Letterboxd:
It’s funny that I watched this on the same day as seeing Robert Bresson’s “The Devil, Probably,” because it could’t be harder to pair two movies that are more wildly different from one another while also being very similar. The major difference is, where Bresson presents very spare, reserved, almost mechanical performances from his leads, Bogdanovich here elicits incredibly expressive, exuberant performances from his cast. (Well, that’s true for everyone but Ben Gazzara, who seems to have the same confident, warm smirk on his face in virtually every scene.) “They All Laughed” is alive with excitement and yearning and romance; every character seems to be be desperately in love with just about every other character. But just as the plot mechanics in Bresson’s film feel minimal and withholding, the why of this romantic energy in Bogdanovich’s film feels utterly missing. There’s no reason for any of the six or seven principle characters in this movie to be attracted to one another as they are, and in fact the script itself is so absent of that logic that its characters refocus their amorous attentions almost from scene to scene. They’re not in love with each other, they’re in love with love—or something. That’s a cute idea, but gliding along with such apparently unfixed character motivations means that there’s virtually no tension at work here, or very little of it that actually feels like it means anything. In a romantic comedy, you’ve got to have some genuinely consequential romantic stakes, and the closest Bogdanovich comes to that is a doomed flirtation between Gazzara and a luminous Audrey Hepburn that, frankly, has no weight to it. It would all be incredibly frustrating to watch, but it’s saved by the considerable aesthetic pleasures on hand: a youthful John Ritter plying his Buster Keaton-like physical comedy chops, the aforementioned presence of Audrey Hepburn, and consistently gorgeous views of Manhattan at the dawn of the 1980s. Earned a full star just for that.
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