According to many so-called experts (including the one writing this post), the communal element of moviegoing is in critical condition, with a downward-trending red zigzag, virtually on the verge of extinction. I suspect we’ve been overstating the case more than a little. Sure, as my reporting over the past few years has made clear, the delivery mechanism for motion pictures is shifting into all kinds of technologies undreamed of by Darryl F. Zanuck and Orson Welles, and certain sorts of films will probably be seen much less, if at all, projected on the screens of conventional movie theaters.

But the private-meets-communal nature of film — and of film culture — isn’t something that mere technology can destroy. Whether people are watching a Lillian Gish silent at a nickelodeon on Flatbush Avenue, watching a Lucas space opera at a shopping-sprawl multiplex or watching Joe Swanberg‘s latest micro-indie on a chip inside their skull doesn’t matter that much. As soon as the movie’s over they want to talk to someone about it, share their delight or outrage, compare favorite lines and favorite explosions (metaphorical or otherwise), discuss how the characters’ plight made them reconsider their own lives or filled them with despair for the future of humankind.

It’s in that spirit that we’re delighted to bring you Film Salon, a new collaborative forum that aims to bring together movie lovers of all kinds — bloggers, critics and academics; directors, screenwriters, producers and other professionals — to debate the most exciting topics in the film universe. Our contributors will come from all over the movie world and all over the Internet; some will become regulars (I hope), while others may show up once in a blue moon.

We invite you to join us. Obviously we’re looking for vigorous debate in the comments, and I hope our contributors will leap in there from time to time as well. If you’d like to become a Film Salon contributor, write me directly and we’ll talk about it. Another great way to join the conversation is to start blogging on Open Salon. If you tag your post “film salon,” we’ll be sure to notice it, and consider it for posting here.

For our opening salvo, I asked a select group of contributors to share a few thoughts about their favorite film of the 2000s, aka the Decade That Ended Without a Satisfactory Name. Today’s esteemed contributors are directors R.J. Cutler and Nicole Holofcener (in my non-humble opinion, two of America’s most important and most underappreciated filmmakers), Chicago Reader critic Jonathan Rosenbaum and the New Republic’s Chris Orr. I suggested that they avoid film-critic ideas like “best” or “most important” and discuss instead the movie released during the past 10 years that meant the most to them personally. Amazingly, we’ve had no duplicate selections among the first 30 or so submissions, although two directors (I think) have each landed two different films on the list.

As one director wrote back when I asked her to participate, this is a terrible thing to do to a person, asking them to choose a single favorite from a whole decade of movie watching. Reading all these submissions has been an amazing privilege, one that’s reminded me of so many wonderful movies (and reminded me of a few I badly need to see). I’ve also gotten several responses I never would have expected, and at least one that made me howl out loud with a mixture of laughter and outrage. I’d love to tell you about it, but that would be cheating; stay tuned as we roll out these responses over the days ahead.

I couldn’t in good conscience demand this terrible thing from people I respect without demanding it of myself; and in response I have decided to cheat egregiously. When I ask myself what movie of the last 10 years has meant the most to me, I then screw up my eyes at myself and ask, in calculated fashion, “What do I mean by ‘me’?” Do I mean as a human being, a family man in his 40s who has watched thousands of movies over the years? Do I mean as a critic who prides himself on discovering little-noticed gems half-buried in the mud of global film culture? Do I mean as a reporter obsessed with the changing marketplace, and ever-shifting aesthetics, of what we used to call “art cinema”?

For me and many other lovers of classic European and American cinema, this decade’s great discovery was the French director Arnaud Desplechin, and especially his ravishing 2004 “Kings and Queen,” a bittersweet ode to female beauty (as personified by the amazing Emmanuelle Devos), doomed love, familial pain and the movies that seemed to imbibe the spirit of Hitchcock and Bergman at their best and blend them into something that was distinctively modern and original. For pure cinematic enjoyment, nothing else this decade came close.

I could go on at great length on the subject of this decade’s undiscovered gems, films that I suspect almost no one besides me ever saw (or that hit home with me, and apparently with nobody else). As a matter of fact, that would make a great Film Salon topic. Your thoughts, please? But if I force myself to home in on one memorable selection, that would be “Innocence,” a troubling and enigmatic girls-boarding-school allegory from another French filmmaker, Lucile Hadzihalilovic. (Yeah, I’ve picked two movies from Frogland, and I know exactly how that looks. I can’t help being the guy that I am, OK? Now pour extra ketchup on the freedom fries.)

“Innocence” struck some viewers, including New York Times critic Manohla Dargis, as a pervy spectacle bordering on pedophilia, a perception that destroyed its already limited commercial potential. But Hadzihalilovic’s adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s novel, while deliberately dark and provocative, depicts no such thing, instead spinning a complicated, tragic and surpassingly beautiful fable about the arduous journey from girlhood into womanhood.

But when I ask myself what film of the “aughts” was both an artistic and commercial breakthrough, what film galvanized a global audience while blending pop fantasy, wrenching melodrama and historical-political relevance, then I arrive at a final answer that unites and satisfies all three of my personas. Both a heartbreaking tale of Spain under fascism and a soaring reinvention of fairy tale archetype, Guillermo del Toro’s “Pan’s Labyrinth” brought “Lord of the Rings” viewers to art-house cinema, and art-house buffs to a fantasy flick. The greatest film of the decade? Probably not. But as a film that carved out a rich and satisfying middle way between Hollywood pandering and cinephile obscurantism, a film that won awards and sold tickets without compromising its intelligence or daring, it might be the one that meant the most.

We’ll be rolling out lots of new stuff as Film Salon moves forward, including a series of essays from guest critic Matt Zoller Seitz on the most important image makers of the decade. (I can promise you’ll be delighted, surprised and potentially horrified.) Welcome to Film Salon. Jump in, the water’s fine!

For that reason, the nonfiction on this list steers away from the most avidly trend-setting treatises (Malcolm Gladwell, we’re looking at you!) in favor of definitive accounts of current events, penetrating histories and explorations of perennial human concerns. As for fiction, the most exciting thing to emerge in the 2000s has been the integration of genre elements into literary fiction: You no longer have to choose between good writing and good storytelling. But if the preceding two decades have seen the dismantling of the tyranny of rigorous realism, there are still masters (like Mary Gaitskill) working in that vein, and following it into rich new territory. The following lists are presented in chronological order.

FICTION

“The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” by Michael Chabon
Two nice, mid-20th-century Jewish boys go to work in the nascent comic book industry, where the dreams and nightmares of the real world manifest themselves in the extravagant guise of entertainment for children. This buoyant tragicomic adventure story remains one of the most persuasive and gorgeously written depictions (and vindications) of the way popular culture transfigures our lived experience to become the modern-day equivalent of myth and folklore.

“The Corrections” by Jonathan Franzen
The Lambert clan tries to figure out a way to live honorably in a world of leveraged buyouts, pharmaceutically engineered moods, dot-com scams, mix-and-match lifestyles and the cult of Christmas. In this saga of a befuddled Midwestern family, Franzen manages to achieve something remarkable and possibly unprecedented: a merciless satirical look at contemporary life that’s also fundamentally generous and human.

“John Henry Days” by Colson Whitehead
A hack journalist gets hired by a travel Web site to write up a festival celebrating the folk hero John Henry. This brilliant, restless novel is about what happens when a cynical, opportunistic, media-steeped product of the Information Age collides with the mythic dignity of America’s past. The fact that both the hero and the freelancer are black only complicates and enriches this novel’s wit.

“The Fortress of Solitude” by Jonathan Lethem
A boy named Dylan comes of age in a bohemian household as one of the few white kids in 1970s Brooklyn. To the smooth and sinewy beat of the era’s soul soundtrack, this is a bruised paean to the author’s hometown, a meditation on American boyhood and a cautionary tale about the folly of trying to escape your past.

“Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell” by Susanna Clarke
Capacious, digressive, amply footnoted and very original, this is a classic historical novel — only the history it’s based on is (almost) entirely fantastic. Set in the early 19th century, it describes a Britain where magic was once a fairly common practice and is still the subject of serious scholarly study. With Austenian elegance and glorious imagery, Clarke describes the professional rivalry between the two eponymous master magicians; the result is nothing less than pure sorcery.

“Magic for Beginners” by Kelly Link
It’s almost impossible to choose between this collection and Link’s galvanizing 2001 debut, “Stranger Things Happen.” Her exquisite stories mix the aggravations and epiphanies of everyday life with the stuff that legends, dreams and nightmares are made of, from pop culture to fairy tales. Some of these pieces are very scary, others are immensely sad, many are funny and all of them are written in prose so flawless you almost forget how much elemental human chaos they contain.

“Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro
Kath, a seemingly ordinary British girl, goes to a special boarding school where she and her friends are groomed for a special fate while enjoying and suffering the loves and betrayals that come to young people everywhere. This odd, heartbreaking novel unfurls age-old conundrums about what it means to be a person; about the grievous sin of treating anyone, however unexceptional, as the means to an end; and about the unfathomable future that awaits each and every one of us.

“Veronica” by Mary Gaitskill
A model with a fluorescent, dirty past winds up as a nobody with hepatitis who cleans offices for cash and dwells on her memories of an unlikely friendship with an older woman who died of AIDS. There’s nothing feel-good about “Veronica,” but this novel is so alive, so streaked with colors and spiked with sharp edges, that reading it is almost a tactile experience. It’s a perfect, slicing portrait of a sad, once-beautiful woman who doesn’t want — or deserve — our pity, but who ultimately earns our compassion.

“On Beauty” by Zadie Smith
Conservative black Brits of Caribbean descent move in down the street from a leftish, mixed-race family in an East Coast college town. In Smith’s hands the classic fodder of academic satire becomes miraculously endearing and sympathetic, a tale of two families that explodes with vitality, curiosity, enthusiasm and love for human beings and the perplexing situations they get into.

“A Person of Interest” by Susan Choi
In this Hitchcockian tale, an undistinguished Midwestern math professor finds himself the object of rumors and suspicion when a more celebrated colleague is killed by a mail bomber. A nuanced consideration of what it means to fit in, and of what we owe to the people around us, “A Person of Interest” eschews obvious answers. At once a tragedy of character and a tale of suspense, this novel is a seamless integration of the political and the personal, beautifully written and impeccably unsentimental.

NONFICTION

“A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” by Dave Eggers
Even if you haven’t read Eggers’ memoir about raising his younger brother after the deaths of their parents, you’ve felt its effect. An entire literary generation fell under the spell of Eggers’ playful, ingenious, self-reflective style (and that was only the beginning of a brilliant career as an author, editor, teacher, collaborator and all-around impresario). Often mischaracterized as merely “ironic,” that voice found a fresh, exhilarating way to approach life’s devastating truths without succumbing to knee-jerk pathos or solemnity.

“The Battle for God” by Karen Armstrong
A year before Muslim extremists brutally invaded the awareness of every Westerner, Armstrong, a former nun, published this essential, lucid consideration of the fundamentalist mind-set and its roots. During a decade when the conversation about religion has degenerated into pointless duels between screeching polemicists, she has brought a measured, open-minded wisdom to questions of faith and its place in the modern world.

“Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America” by Barbara Ehrenreich
At the suggestion of an editor, journalist Barbara Ehrenreich attempted to live for two years on the wages of the average unskilled American worker. She worked as a waitress, maid and Wal-Mart clerk, shacking up in dives and dining on fast food, in an effort to find out how America’s working poor make it. Her answer: A lot of them don’t. If her efforts to suggest remedies are often rebuffed by her own subjects, her visceral dispatches from the ragged fringe of the American dream remain indispensable.

“The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq” by George Packer
A political liberal covering the Iraq war for the New Yorker, Packer initially supported the invasion as a way to rid the world of a bloody dictator but later came to view it as a wasted opportunity. The result of his reporting is among the most measured, thoughtful and self-examining of the many books on the conflict, taking in not only the theorists who justified it, but also inexperienced soldiers, frustrated reformers, the worried and grieving home front and ordinary Iraqis. Anyone looking for a better, deeper, broader understanding of the war will find it here.

“The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11″ by Lawrence Wright
Six years after Sept. 11, Wright produced the definitive account of the terrorist attacks and how they happened, from the fanatics who conceived and orchestrated the plot to the intelligence agencies that failed to anticipate and thwart it. He developed an expertise on the subject so deep that in time those same agencies tried to utilize him as a source and even tapped his phones. Yet for all the knowledge that went into “The Looming Tower,” it reads as sleekly and compellingly as a top-notch thriller.

“The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals” by Michael Pollan
Inexhaustibly inventive and imaginative, Pollan jazzes up what could have been a dreary jeremiad about the “industrial food chain” by inviting us to view the modern American diet as the triumph of a South American grass that can currently be found in every processed food: King Corn. From the scientist who transformed the world by synthesizing nitrogen fertilizer to a calculation of just how much oil goes into “making” one conventionally raised steer (about a barrel), there’s an observation to blow your mind on nearly every page of this hugely influential exploration of what we eat.

“Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic” by Alison Bechdel
This graphic memoir is an investigation of Bechdel’s childhood, spent in the ornate Victorian house that her father obsessively restored and maintained. After she came out of the closet to her parents at 19, her mom delivered a return whammy: Bechdel’s father had a lifelong history of affairs with men, including teenage boys. Not long after, he died under ambiguous circumstances. Bechdel’s years of drawing a serial comic strip have honed her ability to convey oceans of feeling in a single image, and the feelings are never simple; “Fun Home” shimmers with regret, compassion, annoyance, frustration, pity and love.

“The World Without Us” by Alan Weisman
How would the earth be changed if the human race simply and suddenly vanished? Weisman uses this startlingly elementary question and its fascinating answer to suggest just how artificial our grip on the planet has become. Within days, subway tunnels would flood and collapse, subdivisions would be shattered by frozen pipes and devoured by mold and termites. For some reason, this doomsday scenario is more thrilling than depressing; it beguiles us into doing what often seems beyond our power — picturing a much healthier planet and considering a less drastic way to get there.

“Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood” by Mark Harris
Film critic Harris takes the five nominees for the best picture Oscar of 1967, and uses them, and the stories behind them, as lenses to examine the tectonic changes that were taking place in the movie industry and American society as a whole. “Bonnie and Clyde,” for example, embodied the birth of a hip new internationalism, and “The Graduate” spoke for youth culture and its romantic discontents. This is criticism at its best, well- and widely informed, with an enlightening fact, anecdote and insight on virtually every page.

“The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective” by Kate Summerscale
Part true-crime narrative, part cultural history, Summerscale’s exploration of a notorious case of child-murder in 1860 is above all an inquiry into our culture’s lasting and seemingly all-pervasive fascination with detectives and detective stories. Her hero is one of the very first investigators at the newly formed Scotland Yard, who inspired such writers as Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins. Summerscale uses the mystery to crack open not only the allure of the detective as a fictional diviner of guilt and innocence, but also the curious details and ugly truths about everyday family life concealed behind the most respectable facades.