25 Favorites From a Year When 10 Aren’t Enough

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.

And people still like to go to the movies! The big studios, after the usual summer of superheroes and sequels, crowded the fourth quarter of the year with solid stories about adult matters, some of which — “Argo,” “Flight,” “Lincoln” — brought in pretty good box office. And some of the best films of the year were actually, in the old-fashioned literal sense, films, brought to us by the chemical transformation of strips of stuff rather than the mathematical manipulation of strings of code.

Digital cinema is a mighty force, still emerging, and it continued to extend its reach in 2012. Not only did computer-hatched effects help us see superheroes, Hobbits and Pixar creatures; they also added the tiger to “Life of Pi” and subtracted Marion Cotillard’s legs from “Rust and Bone.” Digital, because it lowers costs and increases access to the tools of filmmaking, is also partly responsible for the current boom in documentaries, which were so various and powerful this year that they demanded their own list.

But I’m struck, surveying my own favorites, by how many films relied on old-fashioned methods and materials: the grainy 16-millimeter of “Beasts of the Southern Wild”; the lustrous 65-millimeter of “The Master”; the burnished chiaroscuro of “Lincoln”; the meticulous framing and cutting of “Amour.” Maybe this is coincidence, or fuddy-duddyism on my part. Or maybe technological means are, finally, less important than artistic ends.

The annual ritual of narrowing down hundreds of titles — and thousands of hours of rapture and reverie — to just 10 is a cruel torment, but also, perhaps, a necessary discipline. Although, as usual, I’ve found it necessary to cheat a bit, and extend the 10 to 25. These lists are never meant to be permanent historical judgments, graven in stone. They are ephemeral and subjective, made up of hunches and desires, and they record, in my case, the impressions that I could not shake and the pictures I’m eager to see again, in some cases for the fourth or fifth time.

Top 10 Films

1. AMOUR (Michael Haneke) With ruthless clarity, but also with tact and compassion, Mr. Haneke invites us to look at the arrival of death at the end of a Parisian couple’s long marriage, and shows, almost as if for the first time, how the saddest and most intractable facts of life can be transformed into art. Months after its debut at Cannes this film already feels permanent.

2. LINCOLN (Steven Spielberg) A great, flawed movie about a great, flawed president of a great, flawed nation. Argue about the flaws, but allow yourself to be moved by the grand, noble sentiments that swirl through Tony Kushner’s eloquent script and Daniel Day-Lewis’s sly performance.

3. BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD (Benh Zeitlin) A thousand years from now scientists will know that there was a Hushpuppy, who lived in the Bathtub with her daddy.

4. FOOTNOTE (Joseph Cedar) This Israeli film takes what might have been a trivial anecdote — a committee accidentally awards a prize to the wrong scholar — and turns it into a tragicomic opera with a great deal to say about Zionism, academia, family life and the way language functions as a bridge between the sacred and the profane.

5. THE MASTER (Paul Thomas Anderson) Troubling and enigmatic, this movie — suggested by the early career of L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology — seems designed to be misunderstood. It tells the story of a damaged soul (Joaquin Phoenix) who seeks healing from a charismatic fraud and finds what he is looking for.

6. ZERO DARK THIRTY (Kathryn Bigelow) A milestone in post-Sept. 11 cinema, and an attempt to grapple honestly with the moral complexities of the war on terror. Jessica Chastain’s tough, quiet performance as a C.I.A. officer involved in the pursuit of Osama bin Laden synthesizes much of the collective emotion of the past decade — grief, fear, frustration and fatigue — within a narrative that also works as a tense and brutal geopolitical thriller.

7. DJANGO UNCHAINED (Quentin Tarantino) Mr. Tarantino follows “Inglourious Basterds,” his action-cartoon about the Holocaust, with an even bolder provocation: a blaxploitation spaghetti western about American slavery. More than any other director he tests and extends the power of pop-culture fantasy to engage the painful atrocities of history.

8. GOODBYE, FIRST LOVE (Mia Hansen-Love) The tired phrase “coming-of-age story” hardly does justice to this sensitive, observant chronicle of a young woman’s discovery of passion, disappointment and her own resourcefulness as she moves from adolescence into her early 20s. With her third feature Ms. Hansen-Love confirms her status as one of the freshest, bravest voices in French movies.

9. NEIGHBORING SOUNDS (Kleber Mendonça Filho) In his first feature Mr. Mendonça, a former film critic, chronicles the daily rhythms of life in an affluent apartment complex in the Brazilian coastal city of Recife. What emerges is a subtle portrait of a society in the throes of rapid social transformation, still haunted by the cruelties of its feudal past.

10. THE GREY (Joe Carnahan) A pack of dudes. A pack of wolves. Liam Neeson leads the fight for survival, and Mr. Carnahan conducts a clinic in muscular action-movie technique that is also a somber, moving meditation on life, death and the line between the human and the wild.

HONORABLE MENTION “Argo” (Ben Affleck); “Barbara” (Christian Petzold); “Brave” (Mark Andrews and Brenda Chapman); “Consuming Spirits” (Chris Sullivan); “The Deep Blue Sea” (Terence Davies); “Moonrise Kingdom” (Wes Anderson); “Pitch Perfect” (Jason Moore); “Rust and Bone” (Jacques Audiard); “Take This Waltz” (Sarah Polley); “The Turin Horse” (Bela Tarr).

Top Five Documentaries

1. THE GATEKEEPERS (Dror Moreh) The post-1967 history of Israel, public and secret, as told by six former leaders of Shin Bet, the country’s clandestine security service. Essential, eye-opening viewing if you think you understand the Middle East.

2. THE QUEEN OF VERSAILLES (Lauren Greenfield) How the other 1 percent lives: just like the rest of us, but with a lot more money.

3. HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE (David France) A remarkable story of loss, love and activism during the worst years of the AIDS epidemic.

4. THIS IS NOT A FILM (Jafar Panahi) Mr. Panahi, forbidden by the Iranian authorities from practicing as a filmmaker, responded with this brave and witty video diary, an essay on the struggle between political tyranny and the creative imagination.

5. THE CENTRAL PARK FIVE (Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon) A notorious crime — the rape of a jogger in Central Park in 1989 — is revisited in this painful, angry, scrupulously reported story of race, injustice and media frenzy.