25 Best Revenge Movies of All Time

In this Civil War-era Western, Clint Eastwood recreates his taciturn loner character as Josey Wales, a Missouri farmer who seeks revenge by joining the pro-Confederate Missouri Bushwhackers after his wife and son are murdered by pro-Union Jayhawkers from Kansas.

Shakespeare’s quintessential work about revenge has been brought to the big screen several times. The 1996 version, starred and was directed by Kenneth Branagh, was nominated for four Academy Awards.

A Korean film that pays homage to directors Brian De Palma and Martin Scorsese tells the story of a rising gangster in the Korean underworld tasked with watching the mistress of a crime boss with orders to kill her if she cheats on him. He discovers that she is unfaithful, but rather than kill her, he lets her go, and the crime chief goes after him and tortures him. The young gangster escapes and seeks his revenge.

Director John Singleton’s culturally significant film compelled audiences to confront gun violence in minority neighborhoods. The movie is about the cycle of violence unleashed in a minority community after a high school athlete bound for USC on a football scholarship is gunned down and the toll that vengeance takes on African American youth. A cast of heavy hitters, including Ice Cube, Cuba Gooding Jr., Morris Chestnut, Laurence Fishburne, Nia Long, and Angela Bassett, turned this film into a hit.

The spectacularly photographed film directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu earned Leonardo DiCaprio his first Oscar. DiCaprio plays frontiersman Hugh Glass, a fur trader on an expedition in the American wilderness in the 1820s who is mauled by a bear and seeks revenge on those who left him for dead.

“Straw Dogs” is director Sam Peckinpah’s meditation on the human capacity for violence. The film centers around a mild-mannered mathematician played by Dustin Hoffman who is repelled by the chaos in America during the late 1960s and takes his wife to live in her hometown in England. But their presence antagonizes the men in the village, and the tension escalates from bullying to rape, pushing the mathematician into the violence he had rejected.

What says revenge more than a Quentin Tarantino-helmed film that exacts retribution on Nazis. Brad Pitt plays an American lieutenant who puts together a team of Jewish soldiers who parachute behind German lines to attack, scalp, and kill Nazis. The film’s title was inspired by Italian director Enzo G. Castellari’s 1978 movie “The Inglorious Bastards.”

The 2010 film is a remake of the 1969 movie that starred an aging John Wayne. Directed by Ethan and Joe Coen, the remake features Jeff Bridges as liquored-up lawman Rooster Cogburn who is hired by a farm girl played by Hailee Steinfeld to find the man who killed her father. The film garnered 10 Oscar nominations.

“The Virgin Spring,” directed by Sweden’s Ingmar Bergman, won the 1961 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Max von Sydow stars as a devout Christian who seeks revenge on the men who raped and murdered his daughter while she was on a journey to bring candles to a church.

“Gone Girl” is a mystery drama starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike as a couple whose marriage is succumbing to financial and infidelity pressures. Pike’s character discovers her husband’s infidelity, goes missing, and leaves clues suggesting her husband has killed her. But soon her revenge plot goes awry.

The movie title “Se7en” is a reference to the seven deadly sins that a serial killer, played by Kevin Spacey, uses as the theme for his murderous spree. One of his victims is the wife of the detective who is pursuing him, played by Brad Pitt, and in a fit of revenge the detective shoots the killer. The taut and disturbing thriller directed by David Fincher was one of the most influential films of the 1990s.

“The Great Silence” is one of two films on the list that scored 100% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer. The 1968 movie, directed by Italian filmmaker Sergio Corbucci, is a bleak take on the Western genre. The plot involves bounty killers led by a deranged man named Loco who pursue outlaws hiding in the snowbound mountains in the West. Loco kills the husband of a woman who hires a mute gunman named Silence to avenge her husband’s death.

Directed by Rob Reiner, “The Princess Bride” is a fairy tale about a young woman (Robin Wright) reuniting with her true love (Cary Elwes). The revenge angle of the movie involves a character played by Mandy Patinkin who devotes his life to avenging the death of his father who was killed by a cruel aristocrat.

Quentin Tarantino brings the brutality of slavery to the screen in the 2012 film “Django Unchained.” Jamie Foxx plays Django, who is bought by bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz in an Oscar-winning role for Best Actor) to help him track the brutal Brittle brothers. Django’s goal is to find the wife (Kerry Washington) he lost to the slave trade.

“The Avengers” is the 2012 entry to the biggest grossing franchise of all time. Earth’s greatest heroes — Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Thor, Captain America, Hawkeye, and Black Widow — must join up to try and stop supervillain Loki and his army from enslaving humanity. The movie has made more than $693 million in domestic box office gross, the second highest gross of any movie in the franchise.

Action-film director John Woo (“Broken Arrow,” “Mission: Impossible 2”) helmed this crime drama about a hit man who wants to get out of the criminal life and care for a lounge singer he accidentally blinded on a previous assignment. The assassin’s employers won’t pay him for the prior job, money he wants to use to restore the eyesight of the lounge singer.

Guy Pearce stars in this Christopher Nolan-directed thriller about a man tracking down the person who raped and murdered his wife. What complicates his quest is that he suffers from an untreatable form of memory loss.

The updated version of the dystopian sci-fi flick made famous by Mel Gibson in the 1970s won six Oscars and was nominated for four others. Tom Hardy is Max, who wants to find peace in the wake of the death of his wife and child. Charlize Tehron plays Furiosa, who believes her best chance to survive is to cross the desert and return to her homeland.

The blood flows freely in Ethan and Joel Coen’s tale of a hunter (Josh Brolin) who finds dead drug dealers and $2 million and decides to keep the money. Javier Bardem won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor as the nut-job killer who goes after the money and Brolin, leaving dead bodies along the way. The Coen brothers also won Oscars for Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Picture.

Clint Eastwood directed and starred in this Oscar-winning commentary about violence in America. In Wyoming in the 19th century, a prostitute is disfigured by cowboys, and her fellow brothel workers post a reward to avenge the attack. Eastwood, an aging outlaw who has become a farmer, agrees to take on this one last job.

Martin Scorsese reached the top ranks of directors with this gritty look at the chaos and violence of New York City in the 1970s. Robert De Niro, the taxi driver, is repulsed by the decadence around him and resorts to violence to free teenage hooker Jodie Foster from a life of prostitution.

“The Shawshank Redemption,” nominated for seven Academy Awards, is the story of a prisoner wrongly jailed for two murders. He exacts his revenge on the warden who won’t free him despite evidence that he did not commit the killings.

“Once Upon a Time in the West” is considered one of the best Westerns of all time. The film was directed by Sergio Leone, famous for his “spaghetti Westerns” of the 1960s. The plot centers on a young woman (Claudia Cardinale) who moves to the Utah frontier from New Orleans and finds her entire family slain. She hires a gunman, played by Jason Robards, to find the killers, led by a psychopathic assassin (Henry Fonda).

The revenge angle in “The Dark Knight,” starring Christian Bale as Batman, centers around a crusading district attorney played by Aaron Eckhart. As the Joker sows chaos around Gotham City, the district attorney’s face is disfigured by an explosion triggered by the archvillain. The blast also kills the woman he loves. The DA is bent on revenge and believes everything should be decided by chance, by flipping a coin to determine whether a person lives or dies.

Marlon Brando won the Best Actor Oscar for playing Don Corleone in “The Godfather,” but the movie was as much Al Pacino’s as it was Brando’s. That’s because Pacino, who succeeds his father as the mob don, plots to wipe out the killers of his older brother, his first wife, and the gangsters who tried to kill his father.