[1] It combines pieces of found footage taken from various sources such as newsreels,[2] soft-core pornography, and B movies, all set to a score featuring Ottorino Respighi's Pines of Rome.

In one well-known sequence, a man in a submarine looks through a periscope to see a woman posing in a bikini, leading to the launch of a torpedo and a mushroom cloud.

As the musical score swells, a succession of violent scenes ensues, including aerial bombings, the Hindenburg disaster, and firing squads.

He was inspired early on by a battle scene in the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup that builds a montage from stock footage.

He had a filmstrip given to him by writer Lee Streiff which showed a nude woman, and he thought about inserting the strip in the countdown leader at a Camera Obscura screening of Triumph of the Will.

[11] Describing cinema as "a rich man's art form", Conner looked to store-bought footage as an economical alternative to shooting original material.

[12] He purchased a condensed Hopalong Cassidy western, a short novelty film called Thrills and Spills, a Castle home movie containing German propaganda, and a newsreel compilation titled Headlines of 1953.

[22] In 1994, A Movie was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

[24] Artist Christian Marclay first saw the film as a student, and it influenced his own practice of appropriating materials and establishing new connections between them.