It contains her negative review of the then-widely acclaimed West Side Story, glowing reviews of other movies such as The Golden Coach and Seven Samurai, and longer polemical essays such as her largely negative critical responses to Siegfried Kracauer's Theory of Film and Andrew Sarris's Film Culture essay "Notes on the Auteur Theory, 1962".
Kael's first book is characterized by an approach in which she would often quote contemporary critics such as Bosley Crowther and Dwight Macdonald as a springboard to debunk their assertions while advancing her own ideas.
It is, rather, appreciation, celebration, information, and it is written by intellectuals who have come to be "insiders" in the sense that they are able to discourse learnedly about almost any movie without thinking much about whether it's any good - the very question must strike them as a little naive, and irrelevant - because they see it as a greater, or lesser, manifestation of the mystery, the godhead of Cinema.Nevertheless, Macdonald goes on to say that some of the quotes that Kael utilizes in her reviews are often used incorrectly especially in regards to him, creating a distorted view of the opinions he had on certain movies such as Jules and Jim.
He also questions the validity of some of her assessments of a few movies, including Hiroshima Mon Amour, 8½, and Last Year in Marienbad, stating that she is "perversely literal-minded" and comments upon "her ascetic insensibility to the sensual pleasures of cinema...when she dislikes the literary content.
A more adverse reaction comes from the auteurist Andrew Sarris, mainly as a result of the essay '"Circles and Squares", which was originally published in Film Quarterly.
In Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography, the book is referenced under the parody title I Lost Something at the Movies, and a short snippet of the made-up book is included, where the author theorizes (correctly) that the (fictional) film titled Zombies in the Snow awkward dialogue is actually written as such in order to pass on messages in a secret code.