Not exactly: he omits Mrs. Miniver, Gentleman’s Agreement, and Crash—all Best Picture winners, all social or political bellwethers, and all movies he (justifiably) doesn’t like. He also ignores the Hope-Crosby “Road” movies, even though—as he notes in his typically penetrating and off-kilter history of Hollywood, The Whole Equation (the title is from The Last Tycoon)—those “silly … stay-at-home ‘Road’ films” exercised a profound “healing effect” on America, and their stars were “the top box office attraction in America throughout the 1940s.” Oh—and he does include four entries on TV series (The Singing Detective; Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Sopranos; and Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky), products of a medium whose constraints and possibilities differ significantly from those of the cinema. Thomson can’t resist forays into television: his entry on Johnny Carson is among the lengthiest and most perceptive in the Dictionary.

This jumble reveals a highly cultivated critical mind as it develops and refines judgments on minor issues, major themes, and first-order principles concerning the most vital art form of the 20th century and our social and emotional engagement with it. Throughout, Thomson points out the films Oscar has honored and shunned—verdicts he deems “misleading and unhelpful in the intelligent regard for movies in America”—to support his contention that assessments of movie quality have been consistently “ludicrous.” Embarrassingly stupid pronouncements aren’t limited to the movies, of course, but the cinema has been particularly susceptible to them. The apparently obvious reason is that the sordid commercial standards for judging a huge industry’s product have squashed the standards for judging creative endeavor. But that’s hardly adequate. After all, stately, self-important, and socially worthy pictures, not mindless blockbusters, crowd the list of Oscar winners over the years. And if many of the industry’s judgments have been self-regarding and boneheaded, those of the academics and art-house critics have been faddish. How many critics in 1973 would have assayed The Godfather superior to one of their then favorites, Bergman’s ponderous The Seventh Seal?

Still, Thomson insists that judgments be made, and that they be based on a deep comprehension of the medium. This wasn’t so uncommon when movies were truly a mass entertainment—when they were what Thomson calls “the bloodstream of a great nation” and something like half or three-quarters of the population went to the pictures each week; even up through the early 1970s, a smaller audience had grown up in a movie-saturated culture. (“In the darkness at the movies,” as Pauline Kael romanticized the situation, “where nothing is asked of us and we are left alone, the liberation from duty and constraint allows us to develop our own aesthetic responses.”)