Kill Bill: Volume 1

Released 10 October 2003 by Miramax, Kill Bill: Volume 1 is Quentin Tarantino's fourth film and the first half of a revenge epic split in two. Uma Thurman's Bride wakes from a four-year coma and starts down a death list, cutting through Vernita Green, O-Ren Ishii and the Crazy 88 toward the man who shot her at her own wedding rehearsal.

Tarantino built it out of grindhouse, Hong Kong martial arts cinema and the spaghetti western, with RZA on the score, Nancy Sinatra's "Bang Bang" over the opening titles and Sonny Chiba as the swordsmith Hattori Hanzo. O-Ren's backstory arrives as a fifteen-minute anime sequence Tarantino commissioned from Production I.G. The House of Blue Leaves fight, shot in Beijing, slides from colour into black and white and then into blue silhouette, and it stands among the great sustained action set pieces on film.