Before I lay out my list of bests and the bestest, a few words about the movie year, and the list itself. Theatrical features remain an endangered species, yet a vital one, with an extra spurt of year-end vitality that makes the medium look healthier than it is; how many people do you know who still see movies in theaters on a regular basis? These choices don’t reflect, though they surely will in the future, the emergence of a new genre—the feature film, produced by a service like Netflix or Amazon, that plays in a few big-city theaters while simultaneously streaming throughout the country.

That...