The 36th Chamber of Shaolin

The best training film ever made. A young man flees the Manchus to the Shaolin temple and works through its chambers one punishing discipline at a time, and Lau Kar-leung, an actual master of the style, shoots the training as the story rather than a montage before it.

Gordon Liu's shaved head became an icon, and the film's structure, learn, suffer, master, return, is the template a hundred others copied without understanding why it worked. It works because the training IS the drama.

Foundational, and still one of the genre's peaks.