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.

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.