But within this landscape of bloat and desolation, there is quite a lot worth caring about. More important, there are filmmakers determined to refine and reinvigorate the medium, to recapture its newness and uniqueness and to figure out, in a post-film, platform-agnostic, digital-everything era, what the art of cinema might be. Like every previous period of decline — which is to say like just about every other moment in the past century — this is an age of wild and restless experimentation. Maybe even a golden age.

One way that the movies have traditionally asserted themselves in the face of small-screen competition has been to assert their greater size and scale. The arrival of commercial television in the late 1940s sparked the development of wide-screen formats like CinemaScope, the promotion of gimmicks like 3-D and the increased production of lavish Technicolor projects too big and bright for the American living room. The recent return of 3-D and the current ascendancy of long, loud action movies is the latest iteration of this strategy, and has been more or less successful in luring fans to the multiplexes. The use of 3-D was also a way for the distributors to entice theater owners into paying for digital upgrades, because the theaters could set, and keep, the 3-D ticket premium charged for the temporary use of Clark Kent-style glasses.

After an initial burst of curiosity, however, goosed by releases like “Avatar” and “Up,” the audience’s interest in 3-D seemed to taper off. And then along came “Gravity,” which may be the first must-see 3-D motion picture of the decade, and which both fulfills the criteria of modern movie spectacle and cuts against the grain of blockbuster convention. It is large beyond imagining: the images orchestrated by the director, Alfonso Cuarón and his cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, are infinite in their depth and vastness. You see the whole earth in celestial chiaroscuro and feel the inky endlessness of outer space. Everything floats — astronauts, their spacecraft, a stray piece of hardware — and the viewer’s sense of the screen as a stable, bounded plane dissolves completely. You are in the realm of the science-fiction sublime, a place familiar to earlier generations who had their minds blown by “2001: A Space Odyssey” or their mythopoetic funny bones tickled by “Star Wars.”

But you are also in intimate space and in the grip of a story that is fast, simple and elemental. The machinery of visual grandeur has been detached from the usual grinding apparatus of mock profundity that characterizes the fantasy and science-fiction genres. “Gravity,” a scant 90 minutes long, is a survival story, a tight little anecdote about an individual — Sandra Bullock’s NASA mission specialist Ryan Stone — using her training, her native wit and her improvisational skills to surmount a series of obstacles. As such, it is also an allegory of old-school, precorporate filmmaking, in which the wily artist has to rely on craft, technique, dumb luck and sketchy equipment to accomplish the impossible.

Every movie about problem solving, whether a heist picture or a man-against-the-elements melodrama, can be seen as a metaphorical account of its own making. As they proliferate — “Gravity,” “All Is Lost” and “Captain Phillips” arrived in theaters this fall within a few weeks of one another — such stories add up to an allegorical epic of cinema itself, personified by an embattled underdog who is also a powerfully competent hero. Bullock’s solitary astronaut, swirling through chaos and cataclysm with no help from Houston and only a ghostly mentor for moral support, is a portrait of the artist as a scrappy loner. So are Robert Redford’s shipwrecked, nameless mariner in “All Is Lost” and Tom Hanks’s hard-pressed Captain Phillips.

All of them stress the singularity of the cinematic enterprise. At least in the fantasies these movies contain, there is no writers’ room, no network hierarchy, none of the comforts and second chances of the long, serial form. The larger structures on which the characters depend — the silent, hulking container ships that pass by Redford’s character in “All Is Lost”; the international military-industrial complex that put Stone, her co-workers and a million tons of metal into orbit; the U.S. military that turns Captain Phillips’s rescue into a lethally efficient exercise in overkill — represent the powerful, soulless studios. They can initiate, finance or support your mission, but you can’t count on them to save you when things go wrong. At the movies, you have just one shot, and you’re always on your own.

In other words, these movies are defiant fables of auteurism. It is exactly this principle — the supremacy of the individual artist — that the globalized Hollywood economy is believed to have threatened. Even though Soderbergh has resisted the auteur label and has refused to take the “a film by” credit, the “specificity of vision” whose eclipse he warned against implicitly belongs to the director. And even though television currently lionizes its show runners — some of whom, as Brett Martin argued in a recent book, may fashion their “difficult” protagonists in their own images — TV criticism has not yet erected a cult of the individual artist, whose intentions are legible in the images on screen.