Cinema is packed with stories where vengeance and retribution get worked with chilling brutality and precision. There is a natural inclination to see one’s enemies or even just the characters who wronged us, punished for their crimes, or have karma bothered upon them. Films provide us with the unique possibility to experience the gratification without having to get away from our sofas and to feel the effects of getting someone back because they are harsh, cruel, or disruptive.
What’s even better about a ruthless movie (as opposed to good, old-fashioned revenge) is that the way it gets dished out can be wildly different from anything we ever imagined via an elaborate heist, a thrilling chase scene, or some quiet act of catharsis. Below are some of the vengeful films of the cinema, ranging from the horrible to the transcendent. The next time you throw a hex on an old employer, an ex-pale, or just this guy who evaded you off on the trail, there is a wide and varied spectrum of deep cuts and oldies alike.
Here, Gladiator (2000) leads the list, which goes around Maximus’s family who is murdered, and he is sentenced to death as a gladiator. Then it is followed by Once Upon A Time In The West (1968) in second place and Memento (2000) in third place.
Which is the best revenge movie of all time streaming on Amazon Prime Video?
The Western/Drama 1968 movie Once Upon A Time In The West is the best revenge movie that streams on Amazon Prime with 95% Rotten Tomatoes ratings.
Is there any good revenge movies available on Netflix?
Gladiator (2000) is the best movie about revenge on Netflix with 8.5 IMDB score.
We have handpicked such 20 Best Revenge Movies that you must watch. Let’s round upon them!
20. I Spit On Your Grave
| Director: | Meir Zarchi |
| Released Year: | 1978 |
| Cast: | Camille Keaton, Eron Tabor, Glunter Kleeman |
| Genre: | Horror/Thriller |
| IMDB Ratings: | 5.7 |
| Rotten Tomatoes Ratings: | 53% |
| Currently Steaming On: | Amazon Prime Videos |
Meir Zarchi wrote and directed this legendary film about a lady who exacts retribution on the four men who violently raped her and left her dead. It regarded Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left. Still, it swiftly became a pattern for hundreds of revenge films—partly because of its brutal brutality, which won I Spit On Your Grave a position of notoriety even among the most vicious pictures of the 1970s. We highly recommend you to watch it once, if you haven’t seen it yet.
19. The Last House On The Left
| Director: | Wes Craven |
| Released Year: | 1972 |
| Cast: | David Hess, Sandra Cassel |
| Genre: | Horror/Exploitation |
| IMDB Ratings: | 6.0 |
| Rotten Tomatoes Ratings: | 62% |
| Currently Steaming On: | Netflix, Amazon Prime Videos |
Wes Craven was a guy with a ‘big concept,’ a teacher before becoming a director, as seen in his debut, The Last House on the Left. It was borrowed from the book The Virgin Spring by Ingmar Bergman. Craven depicts the tale of two young girls who are pulled into the forest and tormented and later visited one of their parents unintentionally, who uncovered their misdeeds and wreak vengeance. This low-budget masterpiece is brutal and unpleasant. Still, Craven imprinted it with fascinating notions for revenge and thematic themes of the Vietnam War, which kept viewers scrutinizing its savagery for decades.
18. Mad Max
| Director: | George Miller |
| Released Year: | 1979 |
| Cast: | Mel Gibson, Hugh Keays-Byrne |
| Genre: | Action/Sci-fi |
| IMDB Ratings: | 6.9 |
| Rotten Tomatoes Ratings: | 90% |
| Currently Steaming On: | Netflix, Amazon Prime Videos |
The film that originated an almost 40-year franchise (and counting), George Miller’s breakthrough film pursues cop Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson) in an Australian painting “a few years from now” as he strives to carve out a minute piece of happiness while attempting gangs that freely roam and terrorize ordinary citizens. After his wife and baby have been killed, Max is hunted one by one behind the wheel of his customary V8 interceptor, expressing the same misery as his family. It is a wonderful revenge movie, a huge revolt movie, and an excellent beginning for one of the biggest and longest-lasting movies.
17. 9 To 5
| Director: | Colin Higgins |
| Released Year: | 1980 |
| Cast: | Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda |
| Genre: | Comedy |
| IMDB Ratings: | 6.9 |
| Rotten Tomatoes Ratings: | 83% |
| Currently Steaming On: | Netflix, Amazon Prime Videos |
This relevant comedy was co-created by Patricia Resnick in the workplace, where gender norms remain regrettably retrograde, about three women working under the boot of a sexist tyrant (Dabney Coleman). It will only be when the three of them decide to avenge him, and their empowerment stories will lead them to figure out a way to beat him in his own game and better conditions for working fellow workers during the process. Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin (Grace and Frankie), and Dolly Parton represent the three put-upon employees of Coleman’s sloppy credit-stealing boss.
16. Death Wish
| Director: | Michael Winner |
| Released Year: | 1974 |
| Cast: | Charles Bronson, Lesley-Anne Down |
| Genre: | Action/Crime |
| IMDB Ratings: | 7.0 |
| Rotten Tomatoes Ratings: | 25% |
| Currently Steaming On: | Netflix, Amazon Prime Videos |
Looking at Charles Bronson, earlier pictured here in Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, it’s natural to think of him as somebody who would mess you up if you crossed him. But Bronson is a gentle architect who, in Michael Winner’s adaptation of Death Wish by Brian Garfield, becomes an argued watchdog after the street gangs attack his wife and daughter. Because the crime was punching at the time in America, the film inadvertently seemed to confirm the idea of citizens bringing justice to themselves if the authorities didn’t. However, whether or not the film was socially responsible, it was undeniably dynamic entertainment that produced many sequences, restoration in 2018, and many other adjustments to the source material.
15. The Limey
| Director: | Steven Soderbergh |
| Released Year: | 1999 |
| Cast: | Terence Stamp, Luis Guzman |
| Genre: | Crime/Drama |
| IMDB Ratings: | 7.0 |
| Rotten Tomatoes Ratings: | 92% |
| Currently Steaming On: | Amazon Prime Videos |
When Steven Soderbergh led this drama of strong retribution with Terence Stamp (Last Night in Soho), Peter Fonda, and Lesley Ann Warren, he was only in the process of creating a financial breakthrough. When Wilson (Stamp) arrives up in the U.S. searching for those responsible for the assassination of his daughter, he lands at the gate of Terry Valentine (Fonda), a fading musical producer. But not after he builds a pre-structural family of oddballs (including Warren and the great Luis Guzman). The film focuses on how one person’s vengeance gives the potential for forgiveness after his many failures, a less forceful but emotionally compelling than many other movies on these lists.
14. Rolling Thunder
| Director: | John Flynn |
| Released Year: | 1977 |
| Cast: | Linda Haynes, William Devane |
| Genre: | Drama/Action |
| IMDB Ratings: | 7.0 |
| Rotten Tomatoes Ratings: | 86% |
| Currently Steaming On: | Netflix |
John Flynn led this ice-cold sleeper by a Vietnamese veteran who doesn’t recognize him, and he isn’t thrilled about it, naturally. A seven-year prisoner of war, William Devane plays Major Charles Rane, who invites his fellow soldier Johnny Vohden (Tommy Lee Jones) to hunt the men who stole the homeward award and murdered his wife and kid in a Mexican brothel. Proceeding off of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Operator, co-screenwriter Paul Schrader exercises his meditations on vigilante litigation and the violence that lurks inside wounded men to operatic new peaks.
13. Point Blank
| Director: | John Boorman |
| Released Year: | 1967 |
| Cast: | Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson |
| Genre: | Crime/Drama |
| IMDB Ratings: | 7.3 |
| Rotten Tomatoes Ratings: | 93% |
| Currently Steaming On: | Netflix, Amazon Prime Videos |
This dramatic thriller was directed by John Boorman about a robber who tried to take vengeance on his buddy after he had been deceived. Star Lee Marvin views and acts exactly like you assume a thief ruthless enough to take his vengeance out one person at a time but meticulous enough not to ask for a penny more than he was originally owed. With his loose adaptation of Richard Stark’s The Hunter, later also the basis for Mel Gibson’s film Payback Boorman transforms the story into a jazzy 1960s exercise as well as a brutal conflict between one man, his former partner, and a crime family large and disgraceful enough to be called simply the “Organization.” Overall, it is one of the best revenge 60s movies that we must recommend you to watch.
12. The Bride Wore Black
| Director: | Francois Truffaut |
| Released Year: | 1968 |
| Cast: | Jeanne Moreau, Michel Bouquet |
| Genre: | Thriller/Drama |
| IMDB Ratings: | 7.3 |
| Rotten Tomatoes Ratings: | 82% |
| Currently Steaming On: | Netflix |
Although the director, François Truffaut, agreed to early criticism, he warmed up to the film when the public’s approval was changed. After the color decisions were taken as a classic by the audience, it occupies a unique corner of the ‘Revenge Film’ canon. Despite this, Francois Truffaut expresses deeply mixed feelings about The Bride Wore Black heritage. The title character is playing Jeanne Moreau, a woman who hunts the five men that murdered her husband on their wedding day; unbelievable, Truffaut treats their sale with a meditative, poetic flair that turns it into something more beautiful and thoughtful, while Moreau helps to cement the film as a provocative hybrid of Hitchcock and French New Wave aesthetics.
11. In The Bedroom
| Director: | Todd Field |
| Released Year: | 2001 |
| Cast: | Marisa Tomei, Sissy Spacek (Castle Rock) |
| Genre: | Drama/Indie Film |
| IMDB Ratings: | 7.4 |
| Rotten Tomatoes Ratings: | 93% |
| Currently Steaming On: | Netflix, Amazon Prime Videos |
Director Todd Field offers a fascinating narrative about two parents (Sissy Spacek and Tom Wilkinson) who live in violence due to a relationship between their kids and divorced older women. Ruth (Spacek) and Matt (Wilkinson) reveal the impacts of their son’s choices and of the subsequent acts of retribution that no one can have imagined when the former husband of the divorced Richard (William Mapother) uses increasingly hesitant measures to interact with his ex-wife, and neither parent is prepared to come due. Its engaging storyline will stick to the movie’s climax, so we must recommend you to watch this 2000 movie.
10. Carrie
| Director: | Brian De Palma |
| Released Year: | 1976 |
| Cast: | Sissy Spacek, Piper Laurie |
| Genre: | Horror/Drama |
| IMDB Ratings: | 7.4 |
| Rotten Tomatoes Ratings: | 93% |
| Currently Steaming On: | Netflix |
The narrative of Carrie was reworked from Brian De Palma into a horrific thesis on the developing feminine nature of a young woman under her ultra-religious mother’s puritanical tyranny. Sissy Spacek plays a bright title in front of the dominant Piper Laurie while backing a gory, explosive climax where Carrie retribution on all those who have tortured her from John Travolta, P.J. Soles, and frequently the De Palma partner, Nancy Allen. Carrie’s sensitive youth and fearful capabilities combine to create a horror template and indicate the genre’s possibilities for future years as a societal criticism.
9. Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan
| Director: | Nicholas Meyer |
| Released Year: | 1982 |
| Cast: | William Shanter, Ricardo Montalban |
| Genre: | Sci-fi |
| IMDB Ratings: | 7.7 |
| Rotten Tomatoes Ratings: | 88% |
| Currently Steaming On: | Netflix, Amazon Prime Videos |
Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan is one of the greatest movies on revenge with the enterprise crew. Nicolas Meyer rekindled the little character from the first Star Trek series: After being banished from fighting for survival on a lifeless planet, when Khan (Ricardo Montalban) crossed the paths of Captain Kirk (William Shatner), the two leaders locked themselves into a battle of the will against Genesis, an instrument of terraforming that had infinite potential, including absolute wreck. Kirk and Khan must not only defeat but outthink, and one added as the Federation officer enhances the only thing surviving in the way of a genetically engineered tyrant.
8. Lady Snowblood
| Director: | Toshiya Fujita |
| Released Year: | 1973 |
| Cast: | Meiko Kaji, Toshio Kurosawa |
| Genre: | Action/Drama |
| IMDB Ratings: | 7.7 |
| Rotten Tomatoes Ratings: | 100% |
| Currently Steaming On: | Netflix, Amazon Prime Videos |
While you have watched Kill Bill Vols 1 and 2, which pay homage to both the tale and spirit of Lady Snowblood, it’s not possible to start this movie with Meiko Kaji and not think sooner rather, “Am I going to witness one of the finest films ever?” (The answer: you are.) This masterwork of Toshiya Fujita began with three murders in a wintry courtyard. It went from there precisely into the sort of “rushing frenzy of vengeance,” which Tarantino employed for his narrative 2003-2004. Kaji performs incomparably in the title character as she and composer Masaaki Hirao craft a funky, mournful tune, which cut deeper than her sword concealed in her umbrella’s handle.
7. The Lady Eve
| Director: | Preston Sturges |
| Released Year: | 1941 |
| Cast: | Barbara Stanwacy, Henry Fonda |
| Genre: | Romance/Comedy |
| IMDB Ratings: | 7.8 |
| Rotten Tomatoes Ratings: | 100% |
| Currently Steaming On: | Netflix |
Preston Sturges was considered one of the best instances of his work among a select number of filmmakers in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1940s as masters of screwball humor. Barbara Stanwyck plays in the black and white movie a magnificent artist named Jean, who inadvertently falls in love with her friend Charles and decides when he finds the first ploy to deceive him up all over again. The loathsomeness of Charles and Jean produces a steady roller coaster of dark, humorous shenanigans, while the two fall into love, while at the same time striving to return to each other for a trait.
6. The Princess Bride
| Director: | Rob Reiner |
| Released Year: | 1987 |
| Cast: | Cary Elwes, Robin Wright |
| Genre: | Family/Romance |
| IMDB Ratings: | 8.1 |
| Rotten Tomatoes Ratings: | 97% |
| Currently Steaming On: | Amazon Prime Videos |
Rob Reiner directed this 80s movie from William Goldman’s novel. Although it decreases love-like stories, fairy-tales, and narrative, it is one of the most unforgettable vindictive stories ever made on the film by Wesley’s pursuit of a reunion with Buttercup. Look how a noble, lyrical Inigo Montoya (Mandy Patinkin) is looking not just for the six-fingered guy who killed his dad but also for a chance to speak and announce his goal of killing him cathartically for much of his life. We highly recommend you to watch it once, if you haven’t seen it yet.
5. Braveheart
| Director: | Mel Gibson |
| Released Year: | 1995 |
| Cast: | Mel Gilson, Sophie Marceau |
| Genre: | War/Drama |
| IMDB Ratings: | 8.3 |
| Rotten Tomatoes Ratings: | 78% |
| Currently Steaming On: | Netflix, Amazon Prime Videos |
After The Man Without A Face, Mel Gibson became director in this (significantly dramatized) true-life story about William Wallace, the warrior of the thirteenth century who was the freedom fighter for the Scottish people, who invaded his village by English forces and executed Murron (Catherine McCormack), his childhood boyhood. Wallace’s trip increases into a celebration of and protection from the liberation from tyranny, but not until he becomes Public number, one Enemy. If learning what Scotsmen have following their kilts isn’t enough to make you want to watch this, recognize that it ends with Gibson getting drawn and quartered.
4. The Sting
| Director: | George Roy Hill |
| Released Year: | 1973 |
| Cast: | Robert Redford, Paul Newman |
| Genre: | Drama/Crime |
| IMDB Ratings: | 8.3 |
| Rotten Tomatoes Ratings: | 94% |
| Currently Steaming On: | Netflix, Amazon Prime Videos |
Robert Redford and Paul Newman brought together about two capers, who joined forces to reimburse a mafia boss (Robert Shaw), who murdered their mentor after butch Cassidy and a sundance kid (1969). Like many great stories from artists, the twists come so quickly and furiously that you don’t know who to cheer for after the movie. But George Roy Hill maintains such a sparkling tone that it feels like a win to witness these titans of the 1960s and 1970s work together in the piano score of Marvin Hamlish. That’s why we put this number two on our list of best revenge movies of all time.
3. Memento
| Director: | Christopher Nolan |
| Released Year: | 2000 |
| Cast: | Guy Pearce, Carrie-Anne Moss |
| Genre: | Thriller/Mystery |
| IMDB Ratings: | 8.4 |
| Rotten Tomatoes Ratings: | 93% |
| Currently Steaming On: | Amazon Prime Videos |
With this film Christopher Nolan has broken through the insurance researcher Leonard Shelby, looking for the guy who raped, murdered, and anthropic his wife and continuously prevented him from generating new memories. Unfolding in reverse time to peel down the layers of both crime and Leonardo’s broken research in reverse time, Nolan’s picture examines unusual concepts of how vengeance sometimes fills individuals with the urge for an unhealthy man after the tragedy while providing an unprecedented whodunit to come. Overall, it is one of the most revengeful movies of all time that you watch.
2. Once Upon A Time In The West
| Director: | Sergio Leone |
| Released Year: | 1968 |
| Cast: | Claudia Cardinale, Charles Bronson |
| Genre: | Western/Drama |
| IMDB Ratings: | 8.5 |
| Rotten Tomatoes Ratings: | 95% |
| Currently Steaming On: | Amazon Prime Videos |
Sergio Leone has created several brilliant movies that at least partly hung on the pursuit of retribution. Yet this Once Upon A Time In The West not only his best but one of the greatest ever. This movie is following the mystery of the harmonica man (Charles Bronson) in an attempt to overpower a border town near an industrial center in the Old West, disturbed by the effort of an armed hired gun named Frank (Henry Fonda) and his rich benefactor. At the core of this progressively building conflict, Bronson, Fonda, and Jason Robards play the violent three. In contrast, Claudia Cardinale plays a recently married prostitute whose heritage and sublime beauty are becoming the core of her professional duties. Like many great stories of retribution, the causes are not evident until late in the tale, but like usually with Leone, the upsurge is too tedious to be missed.
1. Gladiator
| Director: | Ridley Scott |
| Released Year: | 2000 |
| Cast: | Russell Crowne, Joaquin Phoenix |
| Genre: | Action/Adventure |
| IMDB Ratings: | 8.5 |
| Rotten Tomatoes Ratings: | 77% |
| Currently Steaming On: | Netflix |
In Gladiator (2000), Ridley Scott led Russell Crowe to a Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of Maximus, a Roman general betrayed by the conniving, jealous son (Joaquin Phoenix) of Emperor Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris). The military master gathered slowly among men of blood and sweat – an army which was different than that previously conducted when Maxime’s family is killed and sentenced to death as a gladiator. He bids the time to demand vengeance while gaining adulation of the Roman people whose thirst for blood even goes beyond the push for power in Commodus. The humiliated soldier and the provisional emperor quickly find themselves in common as they fight for control of Rome across the city. The overall story is so captivating and emotional that we put this on the number of the best revengeful movies ever made.
Conclusion!
Maybe you have been deceived by a friend, dismissed by a partner, or rudely dismissed on a world stage by the free world leader. Whether this comes with the grave thriller, the tales of little high school children planning to uplift societal hierarchy, or Bette Midler singing Lesley Gore in the white pantsuit, all of us sometimes feel in a mood for some well-designed revenge (whatever the cause may be).
In celebration of cinematic name-takers and receipt-keepers, we have assembled this viewing guide to some of our favorite revenge movies in Hollywood history. We hope you enjoyed this list!
