What makes a movie a sentimental classic? It certainly doesn’t have to be an artistic achievement, a work that advances the form. Think of some of the Hollywood perennials — Casablanca, say, or Gone With the Wind. At their core, they are as preosterous as any romance novel, featuring tortuous plots and overripe characters. Emotions are overdrawn. Conversation is false, epigrammatic, like a presidential speech laden with self-conscious ” soundbites.” No matter. Something remarkable happens when you are watching a classic; it overpowers you. It compels you to suspend your judgment. You lose yourself in it, which is, after all, the very feeling that you go to movies to experience. And it’s rare enough to have such an experience that to recapture it, people will see a classic again and again, watch it over and over on television through the years, rent it every few months on video.

There have been a few genuine cinematic accomplishments this decade — the overwhelming Russian film Burnt by the Sun, maybe Schindler’s List. But only three American movies in recent years will, I think, prove to be sentimental classics. Of these, one is an obvious choice: Forrest Gump. Another is Groundhog Day, a clever conceit with Bill Murray as a selfish man forced to live the same day over for years and years until he gets it right — a movie that proved to be the first successful romantic comedy practically since the advent of the sexual revolution. The third is the new Mr. Holland’s Opus, detailng the 30 years of service of a high-school music teacher (Richard Dreyfuss). These are the American movies from our time that people will be ordering up from video-on-demand 40 or 50 years from now, just as Casablanca and The Philadelphia Story found perpetual life at revival houses on college campuses and in big cities until the VCR killed off the revival house.