“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.”

When I decided to pick my favorite Allen films for a slide show, I thought it would be easy. After all, he tells “American Masters” that he’s pursued a quantity-over-quality strategy, making as many pictures as he can and hoping his batting average stays solid over time. Filtering out the really horrible titles wasn’t tough — so long, “Curse of the Jade Scorpion,” “Celebrity” and “Hollywood Ending.”

But picking the best took longer than I expected, because while most filmmakers are lucky to have one career phase, Allen has had at least five. There was the “earlier, funny phase,” the late-’70s American urban artiste phase, the 1980s chameleon entertainer phase, the post-Soon-Yi-scandal 1990s phase in which his scripts got a lot angrier and more profane, and most recently a European phase — one that delivered his top-grossing feature, 2011′s “Midnight in Paris.” And in between phases he’s had slumps so dispiriting that some people figured he was done.

I decided to be tough and limit my list to 10. That leaves 37 titles to plug into the sentence, “Hey, what about ‘X’?” Have at it — and if you want to know how Allen’s morality studies “Crime and Misdemeanors” and “Match Point” got omitted, I’ll explain my reasoning in the Letters section, where I hope we can swap favorite lines as well. My selection process was totally irrational and crazy and absurd, but I kept going through it because I needed the eggs.

View the slide show

3. Woody win of the day: “Midnight in Paris” has become the highest-grossing Woody Allen film since “Hannah and her Sisters.“

4. “Friday Night” news of the day: “Friday Night Lights’” Jesse Plemons (who played Landry Clarke, or the one who looked like a towheaded Matt Damon) has a real-life band that isn’t terrible! Here are Cowboys and Indians with “Troubled Tracks.” 

5. “Office” perk of the day: It may be too good to be true, but according to sources, James Spader is in talks to join the cast of “The Office” next season.  This was after his amazing turn on the season finale as a potential boss for Dunder-Mifflin. Now he might get to be CEO. Seriously, baller:

3. Hot guys holding little kitties of the day: It’s so weird, I was just talking to my friend today who was asking, “When is Sam Trammell just going to do a video where he undulates around a green screen holding a little cat?” I was worried I’d have to wait until the season premiere of “True Blood!” Thank you, FunnyorDie!

4. Jake Gyllenhaal of the day: Hey, Jake is going to be on “Man Vs. Wild,” straight chillin’ with Bear Grylls and probably drinking his own urine. Not because he’s on the show, just because he likes it. (Insert your own 2005 “Brokeback Mountain” joke here.)

5. Best metal cover of the day: Ryan Adams, doing his own song “16 Days” like he was in Cannibal Corpse during a show in Norway.

While his countrymen Russell Brand and Ricky Gervais have had their own problems rendering themselves suitable for American consumption, and arguably have dumbed themselves down a tad (or more), at least they’re recognizably the same performers that they were at home, and offer rough approximations of their existing shtick. Coogan is a total superstar of British pop culture, and a supporting player in sub-mediocre Hollywood kids’ movies. My abbreviated explanation for this, by the way, is that while Americans don’t mind being made fun of, exactly — see under Simpson, Homer — Coogan’s style of mockery is fundamentally unstable in a way that makes the Yank public uncomfortable. He’s permanently taking the piss, as the British say, and his targets include the audience, himself, the characters he’s playing, the movie or show he’s in, the medium of stardom and pretty much anything else you like.

In Michael Winterbottom’s rambling and dazzlingly funny “The Trip,” which isn’t quite a dramatic film or a documentary and doesn’t belong to any other known genre either, Coogan gets to act out his American failure in a mixture of Freudian psychodrama and sympathetic magic. (I’m sure Winterbottom is aware of the legendary Roger Corman 1967 acid-sploitation flick of the same title, starring Peter Fonda and Bruce Dern, but beyond that I’m not sure what to say.) Playing himself, or at least a character called Steve Coogan, he spends much of the movie in unhappy phone conversations with his agents, turning down villain roles in second-rate movies and contemplating a seven-year commitment to an HBO medical drama. “I don’t want to do British TV!” he whines at one point — and that must have gotten a laugh on the first go-round, since “The Trip” began life as a six-episode BBC series, later edited into this theatrical film.

Coogan even has a dream in “The Trip” about a poolside idyll in Beverly Hills, where a fast-talking American agent played by Ben Stiller assures him that all the Stateside “auteurs” — Wes Anderson, P.T. Anderson, Alexander Payne, the Coens, the Wachowskis — want to work with him, before vanishing in unsatisfying, dream-image fashion: “I have to go! I have a thing! I probably won’t talk to you later!” At least that one’s better than the other dream, the one where a fan stops Coogan on the street to get his autograph and then shows him a hilarious tabloid headline, in which Coogan’s dad refers to him with the all-purpose British epithet that American publications don’t generally permit. (Coogan does indeed have a reputation in showbiz circles as a party animal, womanizer and all-around that word, and perhaps the best way to handle that is to go straight at it, as he does here.)

“The Trip” has played to packed houses at numerous film festivals, including Toronto last fall and Tribeca this spring. It’s finally reaching theatrical and VOD release this week, and if you’re a fan of British comedy in its most oblique, taking-the-piss form, it’s a movie not to miss. Furthermore, it’s not merely funny in a hilarious YouTube clip sort of way (although it’s very funny in that way too). Winterbottom (also the director of “The Killer Inside Me,” “The Road to Guantánamo” and “24 Hour Party People,” among many other things) is an audacious and intelligent filmmaker whose work always deserves to be taken seriously, and never more so than when it appears to be offhand and not serious at all. Under the guise of being nothing more than a quasi-documentary about two comedians cutting up and scarfing gourmet cuisine, “The Trip” may be the wryest and most affecting of all the recent movies about middle-aged male angst.

The ostensible premise of the original BBC series — and to some extent its actual premise, since the documentary elements are legitimate — was that Coogan and Welsh actor and stand-up comic Rob Brydon would head out on a fine-dining tour of twee country inns across the north of England, so the former could cash in on a posh journalism assignment. They’re not best friends or anything; Coogan calls Brydon only because Coogan’s American girlfriend (Margo Stilley) has bailed out and gone back to New York after a semi-breakup. In fact they know each other’s work much better than they actually know each other, and you can easily find Internet snippets of their dueling impressions: Michael Caine, most famously, but also Woody Allen, Al Pacino and various others. (Trust me: It’s all better, and funnier, in the context of the movie.)

At the risk of needlessly complicating things, I should add that Coogan and Brydon have played “themselves” before, in Winterbottom’s 2005 “Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story,” which both was and was not an attempt to adapt Laurence Sterne’s pre-postmodern 18th-century novel, and that “The Trip” is arguably a spinoff from or sequel to that movie. I think the right way to put it is that sometimes Coogan and Brydon really are playing themselves, sometimes they’re playing caricatures of themselves, and sometimes they’re playing stock British comedy figures. Brydon is the far more likable, self-effacing one, with a bit of a chip on his shoulder about being so much less famous. (And it’s somehow perfect that he’s best known for a weird little voice thing he does called “Small Man in a Box,” which is now available as an iPhone app. You really couldn’t make that up.) Coogan is of course the vainglorious ass, both the bigger star and the bigger failure, taking agents’ calls about atrocious-sounding HBO pilots and going home to an empty London apartment. It’s a brave and strange performance that purposefully smudges the distance between Steve Coogan and Alan Partridge.

Like “Tristram Shandy,” “The Trip” is both what it’s pretending to be — in this case, a story about combative old friends taking a food-and-wine vacation; a sideways Anglo remake of Payne’s “Sideways” — and an attempt to rip away the veil of fiction and expose the backstage machinery of the entertainment industry and the everyday silliness of those who live in it. I end up feeling unsure whether Winterbottom is spoofing the spate of movies about self-pitying middle-aged guys or perfecting the genre, and I further suspect there’s no difference. The casual, improvised, doesn’t-matter quality of “The Trip” can’t quite conceal how brilliant it is. This is an instant classic of British comedy, culminating in an a cappella duet of ABBA’s “The Winner Takes It All” that will leave you weeping with laughter, and maybe just weeping.

“The Trip” is now playing in New York, with more cities to follow, and will be available on-demand from many cable and satellite providers beginning June 22.