Forever A Woman

Tanaka’s masterpiece is a triumph of Japanese melodrama, and one with a remarkably proto-feminist voice. Fumiko is a poet who’s had enough of her husband and finds community in a society of fellow writers. When she’s diagnosed with breast cancer, Fumiko embraces her own romantic desires, social graces be damned. Tanaka doesn’t shy from the embodied realities of illness and sexuality, nor does she, in the stirring final scenes, hold back from well-earned emotionality that rivals any film of the 1950s.

—Brian Hu