...[a] slender, uncommonly absorbing critical biography which chronicles with exquisite care and wonderfully animated prose the path leading from the ancestral milieu of mid-century Cincinnati, where Spielberg’s paternal grandfather had worked as a pushcart peddler, through the various triumphs (and intermittent misfires) in the Hollywood dream factories ... Arguably the most valiant achievement of Haskell’s Spielberg is that, without too much coaxing, she manages to convince her readers, myself among them, to return to the individual films and to reappraise them on their own terms ... Haskell does not hold back her praise or her trenchant, frequently illuminating criticism.

The exploration here is lively, the critic is deeply informed, and she approaches her mandate with a calmness of inquiry that is a gift often bestowed on the outsider anthropologist impervious to tribal influences ... The result is a fascinating jumble of messages — a study of a critic inevitably analyzing herself as she considers the life (Jewish and otherwise) of Steven Spielberg ... Such stinging observations may have little to do with her subject’s Jewish journey, but they make for tasty, tart little treyf surprises to offset the lulls where the author appears enervated by the story she has been assigned to tell.

Haskell is much better with regards to his early, pre-Schindler’s work. It is primarily these films from the first half of his career that she’s referring to in the beginning of the book as the sort that she doesn’t care for, and if she isn’t quite able to convince herself of their merit, she does perform the far more interesting critical task of describing exactly what it is that she believes is the motivating creative force behind them ... Not surprisingly, Haskell’s most nuanced critique of this period concerns Spielberg’s treatment of women, along with the attendant questions of domesticity, sex, and glamour ... Unfortunately, just as Spielberg’s films continue to improve in Haskell’s estimation, she seems to run out of interesting things to say about them ... Sticking to strictly biographical interpretation, Haskell finds in many of these movies echoes of the various anxieties that accompany parenthood, including the urge to reconsider one’s own upbringing. But her takes on these feel much more superficial than her interrogations of his older films, and she doesn’t do much more with this theme than simply point it out where it occurs.

She’s not Jewish, a fact that, it turns out, matters not at all—she handles the Jewish part of Spielberg’s identity briskly and convincingly ... She has written a swift and elegant introduction to Spielberg’s life and work, in which admiration for his talents and his stupefying success overcomes most of her resistance.

...a work that’s basically all analysis—unconvincing, aimless analysis ... movie buffs will find her scholarship wanting, if not mystifying. Not only are there few new insights (Spielberg declined to be interviewed, which left Haskell “stung, a little red-faced, like a girl angling for a date and being rejected”), but the points she makes range from dubious to flat-out false ... Haskell’s viewing of Spielberg’s work through a political lens is where the book is most compelling (because there are provocative theories being thrown out) and least convincing (because the theories are easily dismissed) ... Her look at Schindler’s List suggests there’s still room for critics to analyze what his art does, can, and should mean, but elsewhere, it feels like she’s just making it up as she goes along.

But as interesting as Spielberg is — and he surely is, by virtue of being America’s pre-eminent on-screen 'entertainer' for the last four decades — what’s equally captivating is Haskell’s wrestling match with herself. What she constantly mediates in A Life in Films is the tension between her personal taste and Spielberg’s obvious gifts as both a storyteller and technician. What she delivers is as balanced a judgment on the director’s life and works as one might possibly expect ... Haskell really gets in a groove when she approaches Spielberg from a feminist perspective, which is not surprising ... It’s a high compliment to any book that when it ends, you wish it wouldn’t.

Luckily, Molly Haskell is far too wise a critic to be flummoxed by Mr. Spielberg’s seemingly critic-proof oeuvre. She nails Mr. Spielberg when he needs to be nailed ... Ms. Haskell’s great on the movies that give her something to write about, like Duel (1971), Jaws (1975) and Empire of the Sun (1987). She tends to slip quickly past those that obviously bore her, although I wished for more about the devastating sense of isolation that haunts A.I. (2001) or even Munich (2005), which is more interesting in its failures than some of Mr. Spielberg’s successes. But Mr. Spielberg’s is a mainstream career, which means there are no obscure gems to be analyzed and celebrated. This occasionally makes the book feel like a twice-told assignment rather than a passion project.

Her resistance gives all the more credibility to her nuanced and often deeply sympathetic accounts of his films. She is alert, for instance, to the intensity of the erotic energy that, however rarely, comes to the surface ... Haskell reads much of his work as a symbolic coming to terms with a parental drama that for a long time he misunderstood, wrongly blaming his father for the marriage’s collapse.