IF you spent a lot of time this year reading and writing about movies — as opposed to watching them, which is more fun — you might have detected recurrent notes of anxiety, trepidation, even dread. Television is better than movies; audience levels are in a state of permanent decline; the Hollywood studios have given up on grown-ups; and digital, a force so powerful that it is both adjective and noun, is destroying cinema as we know it. These are among the tenets of a pessimistic conventional wisdom. Multimedia
Slide Show A. O. Scott’s Top Film Picks Related
Against the Odds, Smart Films Thrive at the Box Office (December 16, 2012) The Year of the Body Vulnerable (December 16, 2012) They may well all be true, but the movies themselves answered this hand wringing with a defiant “So what?” Over the past decade series television has certainly (at last) begun to unlock its potential to deliver complex, long-form narrative, but there are still feats of scale, intimacy and visual ambition that cannot be doled out in episodic small-screen doses.
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