Revenge is one of the oldest, most durable engines in storytelling. From The Lion King to John Wick, movie audiences have made it clear they like that eye-for-an-eye business. At least they do on that giant screen in the darkened theater, where moviegoers find complicit satisfaction in vengeance being served. Maybe part of the draw is that revenge—the nasty, go-for-broke kind—so seldom arrives in real life. In cinema, however, there is a vicarious thrill to be had by not forgiving and not forgetting. Here are 15 of the best revenge flicks.
15. True Grit (2010, dir. Ethan Coen and Joel Coen)
Charles Portis’ 1968 Western novel was first adapted in 1969, garnering John Wayne his only acting Oscar, but I prefer the Coen brothers’ spellbinding 2010 version. Jeff Bridges does the honors as Rooster Cogburn, the one-eyed, hard-drinking U.S. marshal hired by 14-year-old Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) to avenge the shooting death of her father. The murderer, Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), has fled to Indian Territory, and Cogburn knows those largely uncharted lands. For Mattie, it also doesn’t hurt that Cogburn has a notoriously itchy trigger finger. Riding with them is Matt Damon as a self-congratulatory Texas ranger who is also pursuing Chaney. Steinfeld, in her theatrical debut, does a fine job with the Coens’ archaically formal dialogue. Though Mattie tells Cogburn admiringly that he possesses “true grit,” the description is more apt for her, a girl of an almost otherworldly tenacity.
14. Revenge (2017, dir. Coralie Fargeat)
The title says it all. Matilda Lutz is Jen, the beautiful mistress of a married French sleazebag named Richard (Kevin Janssens). Their romantic weekend at Richard’s remote mansion in the middle of nowhere takes a frightening turn; two of his friends (Guillaume Bouchède and Vincent Colombe) show up early for a hunting trip and rape the young woman while Richard is away. Once she threatens to call Richard’s wife if he doesn’t let her immediately leave, he and his chums push Jen off a cliff—watching as she is impaled on a tree branch—and leave her for dead. But Jen isn’t dead. Even grievously injured, our heroine is out for—you guessed it—revenge. Coralie Fargeat’s directorial debut makes the audience complicit in Jen’s trauma, as the dazzling camerawork of cinematographer Robrecht Heyvaert revels in Jen’s objectification before pulling the rug out with a stomach-churning assault. Adrenaline-charged and cathartically violent, Revenge is dripping with style—and blood. Lots of blood.
13. Coffy (1973, dir. Jack Hill)
Flower Child Coffin, otherwise known by her nickname Coffy, is a hospital nurse but no angel of mercy. As embodied by the inimitable Pam Grier, Coffy is on a one-woman crusade to avenge her 11-year-old sister, who is comatose from a heroin overdose. We know this because Coffy tells the various drug kingpins and pimps about her sister shortly before she takes a shotgun to their noggins. Coffy might also be meting out justice against racism; director Jack Hill, in his third collaboration with Grier, populates this nightmare version of Los Angeles with bigoted crime lords and harrowing racial violence, including a lynching in which a pimp (Robert DoQui) is dragged by a car. In 1970, Grier was a receptionist toiling away in L.A. By the time Coffy hit the grindhouse circuit, she was the queen of blaxploitation cinema. Grier seethes with a fiery screen presence—”The baddest one-chick hit squad that ever hit town,” screamed Coffy’s movie poster—as sexy as she is lethal.
12. Cape Fear (1962, dir. J. Lee Thompson)
As Max Cady, an ex-con and serial abuser of women, Robert Mitchum has a way of addressing his nemesis, attorney Sam Bowden (Gregory Peck) as “counselor” and making it sound like a threat. And for good reason; it is a threat. Fresh from an eight-year prison stint, Cady blames Sam for his incarceration and, hellbent on revenge, heads to the small coastal town where Sam lives with his wife (Polly Bergen) and their teenage daughter (Lori Martin). Cady’s viciousness is matched by his cunning, and he manages to terrorize the Bowdens for a long time without giving police an excuse to keep him locked up. Mitchum is an expert at charismatic menace, and Cape Fear boasts one of his most magnetic performances. Martin Scorsese’s 1991 remake is respectable, but Robert De Niro turned Max Cady into a rabid dog whereas Mitchum appreciated the terror of eliciting a low growl.
11. In the Bedroom (2001, dir. Todd Field)
In Todd Field’s remarkable directorial debut, Tom Wilkinson and Sissy Spacek are Matt and Ruth Fowler, a comfortably middle-class couple in Maine who are thrust into tragedy. He’s a small-town physician, she’s a choir teacher, and both dote on their son, Frank, who is preparing for graduate school (Nick Stahl). If only he weren’t dating Natalie (Marisa Tomei). The parents like the attractive, sweet-natured woman, but they sense potential trouble with her estranged husband (William Mapother), a local troublemaker with a short fuse. When their fears become reality, Matt and Ruth get a harsh crash course on an often-infuriating legal system. Writer-director Todd Field gives his terrific cast—Wilkinson, Spacek and Tomei all earned Academy Award nominations—room for their characters to breathe and build emotional investment. And yet In the Bedroom is a revenge movie conspicuously without catharsis.
10. The Limey (1999, dir. Steven Soderbergh)
Terence Stamp doesn’t need heavy makeup or one of those Hannibal Lecter bite-restraint masks to instill fear in the hearts of people. Just give the man a gun, give him a line reading of “Tell him I’m coming!” in his best cockney growl, and wait for villains to evacuate their bowels from fright. This tense neo-noir from director Steven Soderbergh and screenwriter Lem Dobbs does everything right—beginning with having Stamp, a performer of tightly controlled fury, as the limey in question. The title is a cheeky reference to Dave Wilson, a ferocious ex-con from England newly arrived in Los Angeles to track down the bastard responsible for the suspicious death of his estranged daughter, Jenny. In this case, that bastard is Peter Fonda, oozing Southern California sleaze as a record producer who had been in a relationship with Jenny until she began snooping around in his business. In a stroke of inspired casting, The Limey pits Stamp, a bona fide icon of 1960s cinema (think Billy Budd or The Collector) against Fonda, another icon of that decade (think Easy Rider). It makes for a very groovy revenge thriller— one that’s mean, unexpectedly moving and understanding the difference between settling scores and finding peace.
9. The Virgin Spring (1960, dir. Ingmar Bergman)
The tension between vengeance and religious faith forms the nucleus of this brooding work from Ingmar Bergman. Drawn from a 13th-century Swedish folktale, The Virgin Spring features Max Von Sydow and Birgitta Valberg as Töre and Märeta, a devout, hardworking farming couple in Medieval Sweden. Their world revolves around Karin (Birgitta Pettersson), their naive but impetuous 15-year-old daughter. She is traveling to church by horseback when she comes across three brothers whom a less trusting child would recognize as bad news. Inviting them to picnic with her, she is raped and killed in a scene that Bergman and cinematographer Sven Nykvist capture with deliberate restraint. Later that night, the trio wind up at Töre’s doorstep seeking shelter from the cold, and one offers Märeta some of Karin’s clothing, claiming they belonged to his deceased sister. After Töre enacts his revenge, he rages at God for Karin’s murder. “You allowed it to happen. I don’t understand you,” says the father. “Yet still I ask your forgiveness.” In Wes Craven’s 1972 exploitation quasi-remake, The Last House on the Left, he eschews wrestling with issues of moral conscience in favor of sadistic violence, and a lot of it.
8. Point Blank (1967, dir. John Boorman)
As Walker, Lee Marvin is introduced in the midst of being double-crossed. He and his partner Mal Reese (John Vernon, in his movie debut) intercept a money drop at the shuttered Alcatraz prison. Mal shoots Walker and leaves him for dead in a prison cell before fleeing with Walker’s wife (Sharon Acker). But Walker manages to survive—maybe?—and begins a twisted journey through Los Angeles in search of Mal and the $93,000 he’s owed. Marvin used his considerable clout with MGM to ensure British-born director John Boorman, in only his second feature and first American film, had full creative control. As a result, Boorman turns what might have been a conventional revenge thriller into something truly daring: a fractured, hallucinatory and viscerally exciting neo-noir punctuated by jagged editing, surreal flashbacks and eerie modernist architecture. Point Blank is strange enough to invite interpretation. How did Walker, having been shot, get off Alcatraz Island? Did he survive?
7. Rolling Thunder (1977, dir. John Flynn)
After rotting in a North Vietnamese POW camp for seven years, U.S. Air Force Maj. Charlie Rane (William Devane) returns stateside for a most uncomfortable homecoming. Charlie’s wife (Lisa Richards) says she wants a divorce because she is in love with another man, and Charlie’s young son doesn’t remember him. Emotionally damaged and clearly suffering from PTSD, our protagonist is too hollowed out to have much of a reaction. Then things turn uglier. He is robbed in a home invasion by a gang of thugs who kill Charlie’s family and shove his right hand inside a garbage disposal before fleeing the scene. Surviving the attack, he enlists the help of a fellow veteran (a stoic Tommy Lee Jones), arms himself to the teeth, and sets out to even the score. Director John Flynn and screenwriter Paul Schrader (who had envisioned this to be a spiritual successor to his Taxi Driver) know their way around viscerally thrilling violence. Among the flick’s admirers is Quentin Tarantino, no slouch in the revenge-o-matic genre, who has called it “the best combination of character study and action film ever made.” In Rolling Thunder, coming home from war just means a new battlefield awaits.
6. Lady Snowblood (1973, dir. Toshiya Fujita)
When the literal point of the protagonist’s life is to enact vengeance, that movie deserves recognition here. Lady Snowblood is blood-soaked revenge at its most stylish. Based on a manga series of the same name, it revolves around the vicious rape of Sayo at the hands of three men. Imprisoned after she kills one of the men, Sayo seduces prison guards in hopes of birthing a child who will murder her attackers. Sayo successfully gets pregnant, but dies shortly after giving birth to a baby girl, Yuki, who grows up to become a cold-blooded, sword-wielding assassin. Meiko Kaji is mesmerizing as Lady Snowblood, her existence consumed by bloodlust, slicing and dicing her way through feudal Japan as she closes in on the three baddies. Her influence is most clearly seen in Kill Bill (see #5), but the DNA of her cold fury is present throughout cinema’s tradition of female avengers. Toshiya Fujita’s direction is an intoxicating mix of painterly visuals and lowbrow audacity. This movie doesn’t skimp on the gore. The director followed up the tale in 1974 with the lesser Lady Snowblood: Love Song of Vengeance.
5. Kill Bill, Vol. 1 and Kill Bill, Vol. 2 (2003, 2004, dir. Quentin Tarantino)
Quentin Tarantino’s epic revenge-o-matic centered Uma Thurman’s position as one of cinema’s all-time great badasses. She is Beatrix Kiddo—aka the Bride, or code name Black Mamba—a member of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, whose leader is the enigmatic mercenary Bill (David Carradine). Beatrix isn’t only Bill’s underling, but his betrothed, at least until he and his band of killers attack her at the wedding rehearsal, put a bullet in her head, and leave her for dead. Four years later, the Bride awakens from a coma with a serious score to settle. Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert called Kill Bill, Vol. 1 “all storytelling and no story,” but it was no dis. Kill Bill is pulp revenge as imagined by a drive-in movie theater after gorging on Twizzlers and Milk Duds. It is an explosion of movie homages: martial arts pictures (particularly #6), Spaghetti Westerns, Italian giallo, blaxploitation and scores of specific flicks that long ago lodged in Tarantino’s encyclopedic movie brain. Kill Bill was a lot of movie, but, with a running time north of four hours, more than Miramax was willing to release as a single feature. The studio ran both volumes six months apart; Tarantino finally got his wish in late 2025 with Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair. For cinephiles, it’s a 275-minute candy high without a veggie in sight.
4. Straw Dogs (1971, dir. Sam Peckinpah)
This tale of rape, retribution and murder in the English countryside remains Sam Peckinpah’s most controversial work, which The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael dubbed “the first American film that is a fascist work of art.” With respect to Kael, the motives of its characters and the politics of the film reject tidy categorization. Dustin Hoffman and Susan George are David and Amy Sumner, a young couple recently moved from the U.S. to Amy’s native Cornwall in the UK. David’s academia and social awkwardness do not endear him to the men at the local pub. It doesn’t help that half of them openly lust after his wife. Among them is Amy’s old flame, Charlie (Del Henney). The Sumners, meanwhile, navigate a marriage on the rocks. What makes Straw Dogs such a disturbing watch is its graphic depiction of Amy’s rape by Charlie and another man; initially fighting off the attack, Amy eventually caresses his face and responds sexually. Does Straw Dogs foster the toxic myth that women secretly want to be raped? Many critics at the time certainly thought so, and still do. We barely have time to sit with that discomfort before Peckinpah hits us with David erupting in violence at the beer-swilling cretins. The bookworm has had enough.
3. Once Upon a Time in the West (1968, dir. Sergio Leone)
Sergio Leone packs a lot into this epic spaghetti western that finds the filmmaker at his most mythmaking, with Ennio Morricone’s swelling score the perfect accompaniment to Leone’s trademark extreme close-ups of grizzled, sun-scorched faces. Charles Bronson is “Harmonica.” Well, that is to say the people of Flagstone call him that because he plays the harmonica—rather incessantly, in fact, and for reasons Once Upon a Time in the West withholds until its devastating climax. He arrives at the Flagstone train station in the film’s justly celebrated opening scene, where he is confronted by three goons (Jack Elam, Woody Strode and Al Mulock) who work for a cold-blooded outlaw named Frank (Henry Fonda). If these men were waiting for his arrival, Harmonica says, then why would they have only brought three horses. They laugh sardonically. “Looks like we’re shy one horse,” one snorts. “No,” Harmonica corrects them: “You brought two too many.” Quick gun action shows him to be correct. For most of its nearly three-hour runtime, we know only that Harmonica has particular disdain for Frank. Early on, Frank and his gang massacre a pioneer family, including a young boy, in one of Leone’s deliriously operatic scenes of suspense. Fonda seems to be having a blast playing against type. Claudia Cardinale and Jason Robards also have key roles, but the film’s driving mystery is the secret behind Harmonica’s cold, patient hatred of Frank.
2. Oldboy (2003, dir. Park Chan-wook)
Revenge fuels Oldboy. It is why Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik, in a remarkable performance) is abducted from a police station and held captive in a dingy hotel room by someone who has framed him for his wife’s murder. And when Dae-su is finally set free after 15 tortuous years, he vows to have his revenge on his mystery tormentor. But is Dae-su’s enemy really through with him? With the help of a young sushi chef (Gang Hye-jung) he meets shortly after his release, the black-clad protagonist sets out for vengeance. Revenge is all-consuming in this violent, propulsive and altogether extraordinary action-thriller from South Korean writer-director Park Chan-wook. There are scenes here that, once viewed, you will not soon forget. Let’s just say you will appreciate the skills of a compassionate dentist, and you might think twice before you order octopus at a sushi joint. Some of Park’s twists go into some darkly upsetting places. Winner of the Grand Prix award at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival, Oldboy is jaw-droppingly fearless. It flirts with perversity—or just flatly has its way with it, you could say—but it does so with bombast and style. Pulp meets high art.
1. Harakiri (1962, dir. Masaki Kobayashi)
This masterpiece from Masaki Kobayashi unspools an unforgettable revenge saga while systematically dismantling the hollow morality of the samurai code. Set in the 17th century, Harakiri presents Tsugumo Hanshirō (Tatsuya Nakadai), a down-on-his-luck rōnin who visits the house of the samurai Ii clan, requesting use of their courtyard to commit seppuku, or harakiri. But clan leader Kageyu Saitō (Rentarō Mikuni) is skeptical, believing that the rōnin who make such requests are just trying to elicit sympathy and some money before being sent on their way. In fact, Saitō tells Hanshirō of an earlier incident in which a young man (Akira Ishihama) came to the House of Ii asking to kill himself on their estate. But the clan leadership called his bluff and forced the rōnin to follow through by disemboweling himself with a meager sword made of bamboo. Saitō’s horrific story prompts Hanshirō to tell his own tale, and it’s a doozy. Kobayashi expertly builds the tension with a measured pace and control that mirrors Hanshirō’s calculated plan. Harakiri is gorgeous, Yoshio Miyajima’s stunning black-and-white cinematography marked by fluid camera movement. The spare elegance of the setting proves ironic. Hanshirō knows that the samurai assembled to hear him, men who presumably treasure honor and tradition, are repugnant hypocrites. This rōnin is determined to reveal their code to be as empty as the ancient suit of armor that the Ii clan display with reverence.
Honorable mention: BlueRuin (2013, dir. Jeremy Saulnier), Confessions (2010, ir. Tetsuya Nakashima), Dead Man’s Shoes (2004, dir. Shane Meadows), Death Wish (1974, dir. Michael Winner), Foxy Brown (1974, dir. Jack Hill), The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011, dir. David Fincher), Hard Candy (2005, dir. David Slade), I Saw the Devil (2010, dir. Kim Jee-woon), John Wick (2014, dir. Chad Stahelski), Lady Vengeance (2005, dir. Park Chan-wook), Leave Her to Heaven (1945, dir. John M. Stahl), Memento (2000, dir. Christopher Nolan), Munich (2005, dir. Steven Spielberg), The Penalty (1920, dir. Wallace Worsley), Promising Young Woman (2020, dir. Emerald Fennell)
Cutting to the Chase with Phil Bacharach 