On DVD: 10 Revenge-Killing Classics, With Your Host Harry Brown

The small, underseen Brit indie Harry Brown comes out Tuesday on DVD, and with it the opportunity to see septuagenarian Michael Caine lay waste to the neighborhood drug thugs that killed a longtime friend. It's solid, noirish revenge pulp, but it may just whet your appetite for prairie justice -- here are a battery of other rentables to satisfy that itch.

Death Wish (1974)

Naturally. But this Charles Bronson smash creates a new sub-sub-genre -- taking revenge on specific criminals by deciding just to kill anybody with a gang jacket or a threatening manner. He's baiting them, too, going out alone in New York at night, practically begging to be mugged. Blood oaths are dirty business, or at least were in the '70s. In the dreadful sequels and ripoffs to come (including the Jodie Foster semi-remake The Brave One), the ambivalences were dumped in favor of gun-blasting good times.

Lady Vengeance (2005)

The capper to Park Chan-wook's Vengeance Trilogy, and a diabolical narrative schema, radiating from a wrongly-imprisoned girl and her intent on taking care of the real murderer at large, that makes Andy Dufresne's plan-ahead plot in The Shawshank Redemption look like impulse shopping. The final act is a breath-holder.

The Big Heat (1953)

You don't bomb a cop's wife and expect to walk, not in a Fritz Lang noir you don't. Glenn Ford is the vendetta man, Lee Marvin is the key bastard on the tracks, and Gloria Grahame has her own hot-coffee facial scars to avenge.

Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)

A flea-bitten postwar western town with a community-wide secret is all well and good until a one-armed avenging angel in a black suit (the aging but gravitas-rich Spencer Tracy) steps off the train. The ass-covering locals are led, in a grand slam of badass character perfs, by Lee Marvin, Robert Ryan and Ernest Borgnine.

Le Doulos (1962)

One of the biggest fuel-tanks on Quentin Tarantino's mothership, this Jean-Pierre Melville gangster classic has at least three revenge stories in it, conflicting with each other but in ways you're not clear about until the end. Then it's too late.

High Plains Drifter (1973)

Kind of a redo of Black Rock but with Clint Eastwood showing up mysteriously at a frontier town with a dark secret, and extracting pounds of flesh like nobody's business. He even literally makes the lowlifes paint the whole town blood-red.

Revanche (2008)

This recent Austrian movie, out on a lovely Criterion disc, tracks the repressed path of a failed bank-robber who blames a cop for his stripper-girlfriend's death - and stalks him to his country house. From there, Gotz Spielmann's film becomes about a number of other things, including how one might redefine "revenge."

Irreversible (2002)

Gaspar Noe's notorious and often unwatchable experiment takes place in three long one-shot scenes, moving backwards in time, from a wild vengeance killing (easily the most heinous part), graduating to a real-time rape, and then to the idyllic afternoon that preceded it all. You think maybe this flip-flop would make the film easier to take, but it makes it tougher. Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel star.

Once Upon a Time in the West (1969)

The most overwrought, supercool, breathtakingly lavish, preposterously lyrical western ever made, Sergio Leone's mastodon involves the westward push of the railroad, a mail-order bride (Claudia Cardinale), a rogue outlaw (Jason Robards), a mysterious man-with-no-name bent on avenging his father's murder (Charles Bronson), and Henry Fonda marvelously countercast as the vilest western villain of all time.

Memento (2000)

A movie whose very narrative structure knocks the wind out of you every few minutes -- Guy Pierce, suffering from short-term memory loss, scrambles to uncover and then kill his wife's murderer, even though his reality is so splintered it may well have been him. Nobody said eye-for-an-eye was going to be easy.