The finest revenge thrillers
The most successful revenge thrillers are the ones that get us to care deeply for their main characters and deliver the necessary catharsis in the end. In some exceptional cases, they question the futility of revenge.
Rolling Thunder (1977)
William Devane plays a Vietnam war vet returning home after a long trauma-inducing stint in a POW camp and soon greeted by tragic events for which he and a fellow officer (Tommy Lee Jones) seek vengeance.
The Crow (1994)
Alex Proyas' cult classic — starring Brandon Lee as a musician who comes back from the dead to seek vengeance for his and his girlfriend's murders — is one of the most well-made comic book adaptations out there.
Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
Sergio Leone's Western epic has Charles Bronson's character, Harmonica, a man with a painful past, returning to the Old West to settle scores with Henry Fonda's antagonist whilst navigating complex equations involving two other characters.
I Saw the Devil
This is a cat-and-mouse game as dark as it gets. Korean superstars Lee Byung-hun and Choi Min-sik play hunter and prey in a gory, haunting, and thought-provoking tale of vengeance served at the coldest temperature.
Point Blank (1967)
Here's a revenge drama with a dark sense of humour. Lee Marvin relentlessly looks for the man who betrayed him and left him for dead during a robbery and seeks the share he was cheated out of.
Mad Max (1979)
George Miller's very first Mad Max film, a benchmark-setting cult classic set in a dystopian landscape, is a perfect example of getting the best out of limited resources, to tell the story of a revenge-driven cop (Mel Gibson)
The Godfather (Parts 1 & 2)
The entire Godfather trilogy has revenge as a recurring emotion, but the first two are a class apart. Both films explore a father and son dealing with the same emotion in two eras and its repercussions.
Django Unchained
It's difficult to pick between Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill films and Inglourious Basterds, but, Django Unchained has the upper hand solely based on a much stronger cast, notably Leonardo DiCaprio and Samuel Jackson.