In film, at least outside the big-effects blockbusters, this has been a year when whimsy and flippancy were consigned to the margins and the struggle for survival became a central preoccupation. Beyond the steroidal ­computer-generated superheroes, we’ve seen individuals fighting at the edge of their cap­abilities in space (Gravity) out at sea (A Hijacking, Captain Phillips) or in a slightly altered reality in Shane Carruth’s much discussed experimental feature about a man whose past and identity have been stolen by a mutating virus, Upstream Color. VThere has been desperation – from Cate Blanchett’s impoverished socialite in the new Woody Allen, not so much humiliated as driven from her delusions into a vortex of hopelessness, to the all-too-graphic horror