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Ponder, if you dare, Valentine's Day. Think Hallmark card. Conjure up red roses for a blue lady. Okay, now, what single word comes to mind? Yep, sentimental, a term that we movie critics use a lot and never kindly, always tossing it out like dirt on the mud hut of some nasty little noun. That romance comedy is sentimental goop. This melodrama is sentimental jive. Sometimes, for euphemism's sake, it might get downplayed to saccharine junk or up-marketed to maudlin trash, but the meaning is crystal clear: Sentimentality ain't good.

Clear too, apparently, is the reasoning behind our blanket dismissiveness. It's simple. On the positive end of the aesthetic spectrum, you have sentiment. Now sentiment is terrific. Sentiment is exquisite. Sentiment is thought pierced by real emotion. By contrast, way off on the spectrum's low-rent side, sentimentality is a whole other bag of cheap tricks. It's tawdry, it's commercial, it's the crocodile tear and the mawkish sob. One is the Rolex and the other the cheesy knock-off, and they couldn't be easier to distinguish. Right?

Well, not so fast. Forgive the subjectivity, but let me put a personal case to you. The final frames in The Way We Were. Robert Redford has long ago ditched Barbra Streisand, when they meet again by accident on the streets of Manhattan. He's got the trophy blonde and his sell-out job on TV, she's got the child and her ban-the-bomb crusade, and, over their awkward chatter, that awful sappy Memories tune wafts up on the score. Is this mawkish? You bet. Is it contrived? No doubt. But it gets to me every time. I know the scene rings false, I know I'm being jerked around like a plastic bag in a windstorm, yet still I well up. Every damn time.

Sure, the tears feel indulgent but, somehow, not false — they have a validity that the scene doesn't. And I don't think that experience is unique to me. In the right context, at the right moment, we're all susceptible to the bright spell of sentimentality. What's more, our taste in matters sentimental changes as we change. If you're looking to be lovestruck, then Notting Hill or Sleepless in Seattle might do the trick. If you've loved and lost, then Ghost or P.S. I Love You could mist you up. If you have a tyke, then any movie that threatens to separate parent from child — like Kramer vs. Kramer — may loosen the floodgates. If you're a gal with a tempestuous sister, then In Her Shoes. If a terminal illness has crept into your family circle, then Terms of Endearment.

Some of these movies are better than others, but they all have within them deep pools of sentimentality. In any particular case, you might look down into that pool and scoff. Or you might tumble. There's no predicting. (No predicting indeed. A colleague confesses that she weeps unashamedly at, of all things, Armageddon — so do I, but for rather different reasons.) And, guys, don't think for a second that sentimental invitations are exclusive to "chick flicks," or that you're not susceptible. Action films, war movies, sports pictures, even monster yarns, are just as prone to the stuff. All those Dukes and Rambos and Rockys and Bonds — their sole cinematic purpose is to fight against insuperable odds in order to prevail in order to fight again. The manly pride that these tireless heroics are meant to tweak, no less than the unmanly tear that a weepy is meant to loose, is grossly sentimental. Some burly guys saving Private Ryan, some tuxedoed guy saving the free world, some sneakered guy saving the championship game, even that big monkey Kong bawling over Fay Wray, it's all cut from the same cheesecloth.

But it's not necessarily bad. That is, dubious art can spark a bona fide reaction and leave us with a broad smile of pleasure that needn't be dismissed as guilty. But that spark is elusive and fickle. Take Love Story. Please take Love Story, because, to me, that say-you're-sorry thing is trash at its most maudlin. I laugh out loud at Love Story. But I well up at The Way We Were. You may do just the reverse and with like conviction, since the two flicks are, in strictly aesthetic terms, equally suspect. My point is that sentimentality can sneak up on a body — the issue is more complicated than it seems.

Sure, real sentiment is consistent in the response it provokes. Watch a mature film like The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, where the topic is death and dying, and any sentient being is bound to be moved. But there's nothing consistent about the wild card of sentimentality, where our reactions are notoriously variable — sometimes it seduces, often it doesn't. Our judgments are just as extreme — Forrest Gump is genius, Forrest Gump is jive.

This helps to explain why the term is so hard to define. Actually, up until the mid-19th century or so, "sentimental" had a pretty good reputation, only later taking on its current pejorative slant. It's not that the notion of mawkishness was unknown before then. In fact, way back in the 1740s, Samuel Richardson wrote a very popular, virtuously upright novel entitled Pamela, and the book's moral sentimentality so put off Henry Fielding that he countered with a vicious parody called, what else, Shamela. Now there's a handy word that should have entered the lexicon. Hey, did ya' see The Notebook — like, gag, it's just so shamela.

Anyway, keen to avoid shamelizing, other writers have tried hard to pin down a definition. James Joyce, stealing from George Meredith, came up with this baroque mouthful: "The sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for the thing done." Later, in Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenters, J.D. Salinger concocted an attempt — giving "to a thing more tenderness than God gives to it" — that actually manages to define sentimentality sentimentally. In a less poetic vein, dictionaries tend to emphasize the idea of excessiveness, pointing to a wackload of emotion disproportionate to the stimulus. In other words, a movie is sentimental when a really slim scene tries to coax from us a fat emotional response.

But if the ruse succeeds, so what? More power to it. After all, a fat emotional response is what any movie wants any way it can get it. "Emotion recollected in tranquillity" may be Wordsworth's goal, but on the big screen — with actors, words, images and music all working on us at once — tranquillity doesn't enter the picture, and directors will magnify our feelings with every trick in their arsenal. Audiences aren't crocodiles, and a tear is a tear is a tear.

Also, to complicate matters further, sentimentality isn't confined to pictures that strike upbeat, sail-off-into-the-sunset notes or four-hankie, death-do-us part chords. There's a reverse sentimentality too, a faux grittiness that infects a film like Serpico, where the poor suffering cop ends up worse in the script than he did in real life. Those inner-city movies from the nineties — Boyz N the Hood, Menace II Society, Strapped — had the same reverse-sentimental taint. The black protagonist just had to finish as a victim or he would have violated the imprisoning spirit of the genre.

Of course, the summa cum laude of sentimental gloom is Ordinary People, a film that, in its depiction of middle-class angst, plays like gummy Bergman without the existential bite. Still, the gumminess gets to me — again, I'm a sucker for it. I can see the levers being pulled, I can detect the many fault lines, yet I'm happy to be pulled around. The critic in me dismisses Ordinary People as manipulative, but my inner softie knows better, knows that all art is manipulative. And a susceptibility to bad art, at least the sentimental kind, just means the manipulation is veering off in a direction that you're predisposed to go. You're a willing rider on a mechanical roller coaster.

A great film, where the sentiment is genuine and earned, liberates the emotions, and the experience is transcendent. A sentimental movie does none of that. However, it may have moments that draw you in, that don't so much free your emotions as briefly encircle them, wringing out a tear or a smile or a burst of pride or a bout of anxiety. Even if the picture itself often feels false, those moments do not, and it's okay to treasure them — that's personal, that's your own affair to remember.

Oh, a last little P.S. There's a romance comedy called Definitely, Maybe slated to open next Thursday on, yes, Valentine's Day. The movie sucks. It's sentimental goop, it's saccharine jive, it's maudlin trash. And surely nothing in such trash could possibly strike your fancy. Nope, can't imagine that, because we critics know one thing for sure: Sentimentality is insufferable. Definitely, maybe.