Come Drink with Me

King Hu's early masterpiece, and the film that brought grace and choreography to the wuxia film. A government official's daughter, Golden Swallow, goes undercover to rescue her kidnapped brother from bandits, and Cheng Pei-pei plays her with a dancer's precision that changed how screen combat looked.

Hu treats the fights as choreography rather than brawling, and the inn set piece is a model of staging that everyone from Ang Lee down has studied. It also put a woman at the centre of the genre.

The template for the modern wuxia film, and still one of its most elegant.