When I was a little elementary school kid during the early 1990s, the 21st Century often felt like a distant future to me. As reading those many science books I read during that time, I imagined how fun and exciting life can be in the 21st Century, but whatever was imagined in my mind still felt like a mere daydream, and I and many others simply went through our daily life even as approaching the beginning of the new century day by day.

And then the 21st Century eventually came. While the world has become more dangerous and unpredictable since the 9/11 incident in 2002, the rapid ongoing advance of digital technology has changed our world in more than one way, and we have seen and experienced its big ups and downs during this decade. Meanwhile, the global climate change threatens the Earth as well as the human civilization more than ever, and, alas, it increasingly looks like we all will be doomed after several decades.

Anyway, while hoping that there is still some chance for the humanity and the Earth, I have kept writing about movies as usual, and I wrote nearly around 330 movie reviews during this year. Although I am not so satisfied with the quality of my output during this year, I am glad that I and other audiences had another good year packed with recommendable movies, and now I am going to give some spotlight to a bunch of works which richly deserve to be mentioned.

By the way, as an audience living in South Korea, I still cannot watch several notable films of this year including “1917”, “Little Women”, “A Beautiful Day in Neighborhood”, “Pain and Glory”, “Portrait of a Lady on Fire”, “Uncut Gems”, and “The Lighthouse”. They all will soon be reviewed, and I will certainly mention them at the end of the next year if they are as good as others say.