Lady Snowblood (1973)

Kill Bill fans owe this one a look. Kazuo Koike wrote the manga and Kazuo Kamimura drew it, a revenge saga about a young woman trained from birth to destroy the swindlers who ruined her family, set by Koike in the late 19th-century Meiji era. Toshiya Fujita's film tells it in chapters, the episodic shape Tarantino later borrowed openly, and Meiko Kaji carries it almost entirely with her eyes. Kaji asked for much of the manga's crude dialogue to be cut, which leaves a leaner, colder film of snow, umbrellas and arterial spray.