Finding Nemo is a cute flick. It's well-made. And it's fun to watch.

And, according to Time magazine, it's one of the greatest films ever made.

But is Pixar's 2003 animated confection about a dotty chick fish who helps a nervous Nelly of a papa fish look for his beloved son one of the 100 greatest films of all time?

Should it be part of the canon?

Should children be taught to enjoy its aesthetic and moral splendor just as they are supposed to adore the works of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and T.S. Eliot? (Visions of college lit courses on "The Royal Son: Hamlet & Nemo and the Dialectics of Being Lost.")

Fifteen years after the culture-war skirmish around Harold Bloom's controversial defense of The Western Canon in literature, there's a parallel debate over film.

Is it possible to compile a universally recognized canon of the world's greatest movies?

It won't be easy, if the still-unresolved literary wars are any sign.

The debate has been precipitated by Essential Art House, a series of six-film DVD sets from the Criterion Collection, featuring titles from Janus Films. Janus is the theatrical distributor that introduced Americans to Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman and helped launch the art-house movie craze of the 1960s.

Essential Art House - two sets are available, and the third goes on sale June 16 - includes all the usual suspects: Jean Cocteau, Jean Renoir, Akira Kurosawa, Andrzej Wajda, François Truffaut.

Even if many movie buffs know that these directors should belong on any canon list, many would be hard-pressed to explain why. Most of us have come to believe that film appreciation is entirely subjective.

Time magazine film critics Richard Corliss and Richard Schickel, who compiled the Nemo-friendly All-Time 100 Movies list in 2005, have no pretensions that their list is definitive.

"This is just one of what must be a hundred 100-best-films lists," Corliss writes.

There's the rub: Best-of lists, even those by respected critics, seem arbitrary.

Critic-turned-screenwriter and director Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver, Affliction) has argued that, as a society, we have become so afraid of being branded elitists that we are loath to judge films according to artistic excellence.

In an essay modeled after Bloom's book, Schrader says academics and journalists have abdicated their role as arbiters of taste. He argues that film profs are more obsessed with analyzing the political subtext of movies, while the media churn out best-of lists defined by money and celebrity, not aesthetics.

Schrader argues that the "great middle" of film criticism - serious yet accessible film discussion - has disappeared, pushed out on one side by jargon-filled academic studies, and on the other by mass-media film reviews that are little more than consumer guides.

The weekly box office report has become one of the public's primary viewing guides.

We're impressed that a washing machine, car, or shampoo is a best-seller, but aren't artworks supposed to be qualitatively different?

Try telling that to the American Film Institute, which compiles the 100 Years . . . 100 Movies list of American films from a survey of critics.