Ah yes, “Green Book.” It’s sort of mind-boggling that Peter Farrelly’s compendium of tone-deaf racial clichés arrived on screens in the same year as “Sorry to Bother You,” “BlacKkKlansman” and “If Beale Street Could Talk.” It seems to come not only from a bygone era but from a whole different cinema planet, one governed by feel-good pieties that were dubious here on earth even back in the 1960s. The voting membership of the Academy circa 1987 would have given all the prizes to “Green Book,” but in 2019 its prospects are decidedly cloudier.

Not that Boots Riley, Spike Lee and Barry Jenkins represent a unified perspective on black life and American racism, or that they are in perfect political and imaginative harmony with one another. Hardly, and thank goodness. But all of them are interested in offering something other than comforting fables of finger-lickin’ harmony. And even though “Beale Street” and “BlacKkKlansman” are set in the ‘70s, while “Sorry” unfolds in a speculative near-future, each one explicitly addresses the unfinished business of the present.

Which is what I want: movies that, rather than arriving at pat or reassuring conclusions, embrace the complications of reality and invite the audience to really think about it. Mostly this year I found that in documentaries and in other movies made at some distance from the American commercial mainstream.

DARGIS At this point it feels as if the remaining big studios have nothing to offer other than recycled ideas and brands, with some exceptions. I like some of the box office behemoths — mostly, I like “Black Panther” — but too many of them were numbingly familiar in every way, narratively, tonally, whatever. This isn’t new or news, but it’s bleak that “Avengers: Infinity War” receives attention simply because it is from Marvel. Each of its movies is just a delivery system for that brand, though this one did encourage me with the promise that its characters and this franchise are finally goners.

Disney has been the dominant player for a while and, as its power has grown, each of its new movies feels like a product launch: The release of the new Marvel, Star Wars or Pixar movie is greeted like the release of the latest iPhone, including the rabid-dog media attention it generates. There are modifications, some nifty new features, but it’s mostly the same, just pricier. This seems like how things worked in classic Hollywood cinema, which depended on both standardization (through product quality control and storytelling norms, for instance) and differentiation (in the diversity of films and stars and so on).