To be as upbeat as possible about a fairly dismal movie year, there were, in fact, enough good feature films to fill a 10-best list. Another dozen or so American indies or foreign-language imports provided pleasure and offered promise for the future, but a future in which smaller, nonstudio films will increasingly be crowded out of movie theaters—that's happening now—and confined to an online existence as streaming video, or the digital equivalent of literary novels.

Studio production, on the other...