3. NO CHEATING. Every slot on the list must be claimed by a self-contained unit of media. You can put all 15 hours of “Berlin Alexanderplatz” on the list because it’s considered one long film (or if you saw it in Germany, a TV miniseries), but you can’t put “The Godfather” and “The Godfather, Part II” in the same slot because “it counts as one long film” (it doesn’t!). You can’t put 10 seasons of “I Love Lucy” on their, either, or “‘Twin Peaks’ up through the part in Season 2 where we finally find out who killed Laura Palmer.” Part of the fun of this exercise is figuring out what you think you can watch over and over, and what you can live without. Stick to the parameters, otherwise we’ll have human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, and mass hysteria.

I’ve listed my short film pick and my TV season first, followed by a list of 10 theatrical features in alphabetical order. Please add your own picks to the Letters section; I want to see what you’d put in your suitcase.

View the slide show

“Midnight in Paris,” “The Tree of Life,” “Super 8,” “The Artist,” “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” “Hugo” and “The War Horse” were all, to some extent, about nostalgia — about wrapping oneself in the texture of some glorious past, be it an earlier period in a character’s own life or an earlier era in filmmaking. Some of the highest-profile TV — successful and unsuccessful — had nostalgia on the brain, wallowing in luxurious sets, costumes, hairstyles, music and slang from the early- and mid-20th century — even as they repeatedly told and showed us that things weren’t so great Back Then, whenever Back Then was. The short list includes the glossy but unsuccessful network series “The Playboy Club” and “Pan Am,” HBO’s “Mildred Pierce” and “Boardwalk Empire,” ReelzChannel’s “The Kennedys,” PBS’ “Downton Abbey” and “Brideshead Revisited” and “The Hours.” That “Midnight in Paris” quote sums then all up rather nicely. Superficially they’re all so different that it seems crazy to group them together — they vary in setting from the very early 20th century to the early ’60s, and their tones are all over the map: dramatic, melodramatic, droll, shticky, tragic, horrific, you name it.

But there’s something basic and significant connecting all of them, and I think the connection is more aesthetic than historical. It is, as Paul said, about the need to escape the present, and not so much about the particular of the past that’s being escaped into. It’s about tactility — a fear that the virtual world is displacing the real one, and a corresponding conviction that a cinematic or televised re-creation of the past — however stylized or “unreal” — can feel somehow more real than whatever we’re living through now.

To borrow a literary analogy, the texts of these productions were often overwhelmed by the illustrations; even as the plotlines showed us how cruel life could be, and how ignorant and venal the characters were, the viewer’s eye still feasted on those dresses! Those hats! Those cars! Those hissing vinyl records spinning on those elegant Victrolas! And of course the white beams of light slicing through cigarette-befogged darkness in movie theaters and casting black-and-white images up on big screens, images shots on honest-to-God film.

Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo” and Michel Hazanavicius’s “The Artist” both worshiped, even fetishized silent cinema, or more accurately, the idea of silent cinema, and the era that spawned it: a time of steam engines and big black automobiles and stony-faced men in hats and long coats. Like the boozy, smoky, wood-and-wool-and-brass tableaux of “Mildred Pierce” and “Boardwalk Empire” and ABC’s intriguing if ultimately unsuccessful “Pan Am,” these films were not so much about the historical particulars of a time or place as the re-created, fantasized texture of it. Anything prior to the 1990s could still be considered a remnant of the Industrial or Machine Age, an epoch in which things were physical and present — when they were indisputably and obviously there, and not some incredible digital simulation; when some person, or some machine run by people, made things, and when even popular culture was something you could touch, or that you at least knew you could touch: a book, a film, a record. Until as recently as 10 years ago, even television was shot on tape, and could (in a pinch) be cut on tape, with a razor blade and tape — just like film, or a construction paper collage.

That’s all gone now, or going away soon: This was the year that major camera manufacturers announced that they would no longer make new motion picture film cameras. This same year we learned that the days of film itself were numbered. Some sources claim it will be extinct by 2015. Major distributors just don’t see the point of producing it any longer, now that everything is being shot, edited and shown digitally. Major studios announced that they would begin phasing out rentals of actual film prints, because it was too expensive and bothersome to store, maintain and ship them — and besides, now that everything has been converted to ones and zeroes, what’s the point?

This was also the year that we started to hear very serious rumblings about the end of media as a physical object that one could hold in one’s hand: not just the vinyl records and 35mm film prints that old timers like yours truly love to blather on about, but the supposedly more cold and forbidding late 20th century versions, such as videotapes and CDs and DVDs. Those are on their way out, too, if reports — and the maneuverings of industry giants such as Netflix — are to be believed. It’ll all be virtual soon, an endless stream of data held on gigantic servers in undisclosed locations and “licensed” to us for private use on our computers and mobile devices and perhaps soon in the chips that will be installed on the brain stem of every American newborn, along with the port that allows them to jack into the Matrix.

“All men fear death,” says Ernest Hemingway in “Midnight in Paris.” “It’s a natural fear that consumes us all. We fear death because we feel that we haven’t loved well enough or loved at all, which ultimately are one and the same.” The film’s tone is rather jokey as he says this, but from the intensity in his eyes you can tell he’s not kidding — and if you read the words in plain black-and-white, divested of lush celluloid images and piquant music, it sure does feel like a line from a manifesto, or a lament.

Allen ultimately deflates the very nostalgia that his movie indulges; the film’s comic climax takes Gil and his girlfriend Adriana, a ’20s Frenchwoman, back to Paris during the Belle Epoque era, the period that she worships as brazenly as Gil worships the Paris of her own time. “I’m from the ’20s, and I’m telling you the golden age is la Belle Epoque,” she insists. But really: “Midnight in Paris” is not a hit because of the director’s clear-headed attitude about the blind worship of earlier, supposedly more interesting times. It’s a hit because of the clothes, the music, the cultural references and the comic star power of the Paris writers and artists we’ve read about in school. It’s a hit because it’s a warm bath in another era, and a blessed escape from this one.

J.J. Abrams’ Steven Spielberg pastiche “Super 8″ was not merely a paean to the filmmaker’s adolescence in the late ’70s and early ’80s — an era that spawned such early Spielberg classics as “Jaws” and “Close Encounters” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “E.T.” — but a valentine to the last great age of analog media, the Carter-Reagan-Bush I era, when records were on vinyl and films were shot on film, and both could be looked at, lifted, touched. Abrams went so crazy re-creating Spielbergian, late’70s lens flares that there were times when the actors’ faces were partly obscured by horizontal bands of blue light. A telling moment at a drugstore showed the teenage hero waiting to get his Super 8mm film back; in the days — days!! — leading up to that glorious moment, he looked as anxious as a young father in some mid-20th century sitcom, pacing around in a hospital waiting room and smoking cigarette after cigarette until the doctor arrived with the good news. And while Abrams’ “Super 8″ was playing in multiplexes this past summer, Spielberg himself was finishing his epic “War Horse,” which is set during World War I but strains to evoke the shots, camera moves, music, pacing and tone of a 1940s Hollywood prestige picture. (During a recent New York preview screening, Spielberg said he was hugely influenced by 1940s John Ford films, particularly “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon” and “How Green Was My Valley.”)

“You’ll never be a great writer if you fear dying,” Hemingway tells Gil in “Midnight in Paris.” “Do you?”

“Yeah, I do,” Gil replies. “I would say it’s my greatest fear.”

A more ruminative, searching, open-ended take could be found in Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life,” a Proustian reverie by way of suburban Texas in the 1950s and ’60s. To watch this movie is to be completely immersed in the mind of another person: ostensibly the narrator, Jack (Sean Penn), but really Malick himself, a generous filmmaker who seems to be remembering his own past because he can’t remember anyone else’s. It’s a tough movie in some ways, filled with confusion, pain, regret and messy Oedipal resentments and desires. But ultimately the look and sound of the film eclipses all of that. What predominates is an overwhelming, at times helpless-seeming urge to escape this horrible, sterile modern prison of virtual being-and-nothingness, and go back to a more casually physical time, a time when you could stay outside all day and all night without your parents worrying about your being raped or doped up or kidnapped by sex slavers or organ thieves or converted to Shariah Law or whatever bugaboo is obsessing modern parents at this very moment; a time when you could fall down and scab your knees, tear-ass through woods and vacant lots, roll around in grass, even strap a poor frog to a rocket and then feel horrible about it later, then come home and clean the dirt out from under your fingernails and sit down to supper with Mom and Dad, who maybe didn’t know quite what to do with you, and perhaps even resented you at times, but loved you unconditionally.

Well, maybe not your parents, but somebody’s.

“The Tree of Life” ends on a beach that might represent the afterlife or that might simply be a metaphorical or figurative space — a place where all Jack’s most beloved fellow beings can gather in one place and just be loved, admired, embraced. It’s a place where the virtual becomes real and the dead return to us, if only for a moment. A place where everything is beautiful and nothing hurts.

“That’s what the present is,” Gil says in “Paris,” responding to the quote that opens this article. “It’s a little unsatisfying because life is unsatisfying.”

9. “George Harrison: Living in the Material World” (HBO)

Martin Scorsese’s documentary about the quiet Beatle wasn’t on the level of his Bob Dylan documentary, “No Direction Home,” but then, very few documentaries are. This was fascinating stuff, though — an honest attempt to capture an unusually enigmatic pop artist without oversimplifying or misrepresenting him. Harrison’s second wife, Olivia, provided Scorsese with rarely seen photos and film footage, and perhaps as a result, there were parts where it seemed as though the director was treading lightly (the documentary was somewhat light on details about Harrison’s first marriage to Patti Boyd, though her affair with Eric Clapton was the subject of a long, piercing segment). But the depiction of Harrison’s spiritual and musical striving, his political activism, his second career as a film producer, and his somewhat prickly relationship with his fellow Beatles were all expertly handled. And Scorsese found an unusual storytelling rhythm that suited his subject, immersing the audience in long stretches of musical-visual reverie — basically long, uninterrupted, narration-free music videos — and then abruptly cutting them off, sometimes in mid-lyric, and cutting to an interview. The effect was like being in a blissful trance only to have it suddenly and cruelly shattered.

8. “Prohibition” (PBS)

Watch Roots of PROHIBITION A Nation of Drunkards on PBS. See more from Ken Burns.

Documentarian Ken Burns is slowly but surely working his way through America’s defining historical subjects and pivotal eras, but damned if his tortoiselike doggedness doesn’t pay off more often than not. “Prohibition,” about the impact of the 18th Amendment on American life, was one of his best works, right up there with “The Civil War” and “Baseball.” It had everything one could possibly want from an epic historical work — big themes, great characters, period detail, and plenty of violence, sex, intoxication and modern-day resonance (without putting too fine a point on it, Burns showed how the hypocrisies of the anti-booze crusade presaged the war on drugs). Plus, the series was drily funny, pun intended.

7. “The Education of Dee Dee Ricks” (HBO)

Personal portraits of cancer patients rise or fall for the same reasons as other stories: Either the characters and themes and execution are compelling, or they aren’t. This film by Perri Peltz is aces in every department. But while it gives the physical and emotional impact of cancer the attention it deserves, it’s ultimately about more than one woman’s determination to battle illness. The title character, a rich and conventionally attractive woman who finds out she has cancer, is moved to wonder what happens to women who don’t have her advantages. “It’s not only a medical challenge; it’s a moral challenge,” a doctor tells her. The short version: They suffer. Her casual narcissism punctured for good, Ricks remakes herself as an activist and philanthropist and radically revamps her life to match her own health challenges and the mission she’s embarked upon. This is not just a powerfully affecting personal story; it’s a parable of the 1 percent being forced to learn that other people exist, and that their lives matter, too.

6. “Harry Belafonte: Sing Your Song” (HBO)

An extraordinary portrait of an extraordinary man, “Harry Belafonte: Sing Your Song” is a smart, loving profile of the singer-actor-activist that stresses the last part of that hyphenate. Belafonte’s racial and political consciousness drove every significant decision in his career as both artist and public figure, and his convictions continued to evolve to meet new realities; he segued from anti-Jim Crow activism in the ’60s to anti-apartheid activism in the ’80s to a kind of border-shattering, ethnicity-transcending One World-ism in the 21st century. This documentary by Susan Rostock shows how much that decision cost him, turning him into an absent father even as it marked him as a great and influential person.

5. “Woody Allen: A Documentary” (PBS)

This documentary by Robert Weide is one of the sharpest, funniest, most revelatory installments of “American Masters.” It helps that the director, frequent Larry David collaborator Robert Weide, not only knows Woody Allen’s life and filmography but has thought about what they have meant in the greater scheme. The movie works as both a general survey of Woody Allen’s long and and prolific career as a writer-director-actor-comedian and as a knowing portrait of how comedy changed during the second half of the 20th century. Allen himself is unexpectedly forthcoming and available, speaking frankly about his neuroses, his romantic relationships (including the Soon-Yi scandal), his artistic obsessions, and his quantity-over-quality strategy (the natural evolution of his early carer as a joke writer and stand-up comic). At one point Allen shows the director a drawer full of scraps of paper on which he’s scrawled fragments of ideas for films — a modest trove of inspiration, like this documentary.

4. “If a Tree Falls” (PBS)

Director Marshall Curry’s look at arson-inclined members of the Earth Liberation Front is a troubling and troublesome documentary, intelligent and impassioned but obviously deeply conflicted. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a movie about violent response to perceived injustice that seemed to be working out its own feelings right there on the screen while you watched it. The closest equivalent to “If a Tree Falls” might be Tony Kaye’s underrated and epically long documentary about the antiabortion fringe, “Lake of Fire.” It’s alternately enthralled and horrified by the actions of the ELF, a mostly young bunch of activists who decided — not without reason — that nonviolent protest against the wanton destruction of forests was getting them nowhere, and that they had to torch logging facilities and other offending structures to force the machine to grind to a halt.

3. “Where Soldiers Come From” (PBS)

Watch Where Soldiers Come From – Trailer on PBS. See more from POV.

This is a low-key and concise yet brilliant “P.O.V.” documentary by Heather Courtney, about a group of small-town friends who join the National Guard and get shipped off to fight in the war on terror. As I wrote in my review: “What makes ‘Where Soldiers Come From’ so unusual is the relaxed and intelligent way that it connects the private and public experience of war. Deftly switching back and forth between a tiny town in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and the chaos of Afghanistan, the movie plays like an elegant real-life answer to ‘The Best Years of Our Lives’ and ‘The Deer Hunter.’ … These soldiers, their girlfriends and their families aren’t rhetorical abstractions to the filmmaker. They’re ordinary young people who viewed service during wartime as a career option and were forever changed by their experience.”

2. “Last Train Home” (PBS)

This Chinese documentary, which aired last September on “POV,” is one of the best movies of any kind that I’ve ever seen. I am convinced that if every working filmmaker or aspiring filmmaker would just set aside 90 minutes to watch and really absorb it, film and television would improve overnight. It’s that good. As I wrote in a Sept. 27 review, the movie is “about a Chinese family joining 130 million migrant workers as they journey from the city to their home in the country to reunite with their families at New Year’s. Directed by Lixin Fan, “Last Train Home” is not a travelogue, a polemic or a history lesson, but simply a story of people, told with elegance and care. It’s also a rare recent documentary that avoids every modern nonfiction cliché. It features no narration by moonlighting movie stars, no bouncy hand-held camerawork, no fast cutting, no clever graphics, no reenactments, no archival photos, no razzle-dazzle montages with ironic pop songs or Philip Glass music, no horrifying family revelations, and no competitions ending with a teary-eyed champion hoisting a trophy. All it does is point a camera and capture life as it happens.”

1. Occupy Wall Street videos of police brutality

I struggled with whether to even include this on my list, since technically none of the videos of police abusing Occupy Wall Street protesters really qualify as “movies” or “programs” in any conventional sense. Some of the most revealing (and often horrifying) images were captured on the fly with the tiny built-in lenses of camera phones, with rough sound that dropped out regularly and grainy images that bounced all over the place, usually because the camerapeople were being jostled by protesters or hauling ass down the street to avoid getting their skulls cracked open. For the first time since the Vietnam era, a mostly young group of Americans was out there risking injury and imprisonment to say what millions more people know in their bones to be true but couldn’t or wouldn’t articulate themselves: that the very rich are legally bribing our elected officials, distorting our tax code and our regulatory laws, and otherwise rigging the game, such as it is, to make more money flow into their pockets, year after year, oblivious to the fact that their greed is shrinking the middle class and turning the daily lives of increasing millions of Americans into a blandly degrading and endless slog, a smiley-faced American version of a Third World sweatshop. For daring to even begin to articulate these shapeless and protean but real resentments — to very, very briefly force cities to stop whatever mundane daily business they were doing, and think about this madness for a few days, or weeks — the protesters were subjected to the full force and might of the nation’s municipal police departments (and in some cases, pathetic campus rent-a-cops playing soldier dress-up). The message was crystal clear. This is what happens when you question the so-called natural order of things: You will be beaten, kicked, pepper-sprayed, shot with rubber bullets. Open your mouth and you get a boot in it. Offend the people who own this country, inconvenience the worker-bees during their daily commutes, and you’ll get stomped into pulp like grapes in a bin.

“It does not make you tough to hurt these people!” shouted a real soldier in a much-viewed viral video, chastising the toy soldiers of the NYPD who beat and pepper-sprayed unarmed protesters. But the powers that be are largely immune to shame; overwhelming, sadistic force is the whole point of the exercise, shock and awe in the streets of America. These images are not going away. They will exist forever in cyberspace. I’m deeply glad that everyone had to see them, however briefly, because now we’re all on notice about what sort of country we live in, if by chance any of us were ignorant or stupid enough to doubt it.