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Best Redemption Movies

Ranked by how strongly each film carries the visual signature of redemption cinema — measured across 1,207 indexed frames from 18 films, against a 404,689-frame catalogue baseline. Not by box office, and not by vote.

Redemption films over-index on neon sign, cigarette and white shirt — the objects that make the genre recognisable before a line is spoken.

  1. 1

    Pulp Fiction (1994)

    Quentin TarantinoDP Andrzej SekulaIMDb 8.8TMDB 8.5See in full on FrameThrower →

    Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson) and Vincent Vega (John Travolta) are two hitmen who are out to retrieve a suitcase stolen from their employer, mob boss Marsellus Wallace (Ving Rhames). Wallace has also asked Vincent to take his wife Mia (Uma Thurman) out a few days later when Wallace himself will be out of town. Butch Coolidge (Bruce Willis) is an aging boxer who is paid by Wallace to lose his fight. The lives of these seemingly unrelated people are woven together comprising of a series of funny, bizarre and uncalled-for incidents.

  2. 2

    Constantine (2005)

    Francis LawrenceDP Philippe RousselotIMDb 7.0TMDB 7.1See in full on FrameThrower →

    John Constantine is approached by Det. Angela Dodson who needs his help to prove that her twin sister Isabel's death was not a suicide. The dead woman was a devout Catholic and Angela refuses to accept she would have taken her own life. She's asked Constantine for help because he has a reputation for dealing with the mystical. In fact, he is a demon hunter whose sole purpose on Earth is to send demons back to the nether regions. John himself has been to Hell and knows that he is destined to return there on his death - but hopes his good deeds may find him a place in Heaven. As he looks into Isabel's death, he realizes demons are trying to break through to the human world, and his battles lead him into a direct conflict with Satan.

  3. 3

    The Verdict (1982)

    Sidney LumetDP Andrzej BartkowiakIMDb 7.7TMDB 7.4See in full on FrameThrower →

    Frank Galvin was once a promising Boston lawyer with a bright future ahead. An incident early in his career in which he was trying to do the right thing led to him being fired from the prestigious law firm with which he was working, almost being disbarred, and his wife leaving him. Continually drowning his sorrows in booze, he is now an ambulance-chasing lawyer, preying on the weak and vulnerable, and bending the truth whenever necessary to make what few dollars he has, as he has only had a few cases in the last few years, losing the last four. His only friend in the profession is his now retired ex-partner, Mickey Morrissey, who gets Frank a case, his fee solely a percentage of what his clients are awarded. The case should net Frank tens of thousands of dollars by settling out of court, that money which would at least get him back on his feet. It is a negligence suit brought on behalf of Deborah Ann Kaye by her sister and brother-in-law, Sally and Kevin Doneghy, against St. Catherine Labouré Hospital, operated by the Archdiocese of Boston, and Drs. Towler and Marks. Kaye was admitted to the hospital for what should have been a routine delivery, but something that happened while Kaye was on the operating room table led to her brain being deprived of oxygen, resulting in permanent brain damage, and Kaye now being in a totally vegetative state requiring hospitalization for the rest of her life. Frank eventually learns that the cause seems to be that Dr. Towler, the anesthesiologist and an expert in the field, used the incorrect anesthetic for the situation. However, all but one person that was in the operating room that day has provided depositions that nothing improper occurred in the operating room. The one holdout is the operating room head nurse, Maureen Rooney, who is not talking, period, to Frank or the other side. Upon seeing the state Kaye is in, Frank unilaterally decides to do what he believes is the right thing by declining the lucrative out-of-court settlement offered by the Archdiocese and take the case to court. In doing so, he hopes the truth that the hospital and the doctors truly were negligent comes to light. Feeling that this case may be a turning point in his life, Frank has a new spring in his step, enough that he attracts the attention of Laura Fischer, the two who begin a relationship. Despite having whatever the truth is on his side, that truth which he does not know, and having an expert witness of his own, Frank has an uphill battle in that the Archdiocese has retained the services of Ed Concannon, a high-priced lawyer who has a large team of associates whose task is to help Concannon and the Archdiocese win at any cost. Concannon's task seems even easier as Judge Hoyle, the presiding judge, is already biased against Frank for taking the case to court.

  4. 4

    Mean Streets (1973)

    Martin ScorseseDP Kent L. WakefordIMDb 7.2TMDB 7.1See in full on FrameThrower →

    The future is set for Tony and Michael -- owning a neighborhood bar and making deals in the mean streets of New York City's Little Italy. For Charlie, the future is less clearly defined. A small-time hood, he works for his uncle, making collections and reclaiming bad debts. In love with a woman of whom his uncle disapproves (due to her epilepsy) and a friend of her disturbed cousin, Johnny Boy, a near psychotic whose trouble-making threatens them all -- Charlie just cannot reconcile opposing values. A failed attempt to escape (to Brooklyn) moves them all a step closer to a bitter, almost preordained future.

  5. 5

    The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

    Frank DarabontDP Roger DeakinsIMDb 9.3TMDB 8.7See in full on FrameThrower →

    Imprisoned in the 1940s for the double murder of his wife and her lover, upstanding banker Andy Dufresne begins a new life at the Shawshank prison, where he puts his accounting skills to work for an amoral warden. During his long stretch in prison, Dufresne comes to be admired by the other inmates -- including an older prisoner named Red -- for his integrity and unquenchable sense of hope.

  6. 6

    Paris, Texas (1984)

    Wim WendersDP Robby MüllerIMDb 8.1TMDB 8.1See in full on FrameThrower →

    A man wanders out of the desert after a four year absence. His brother finds him, and together they return to L.A. to reunite the man with his young son. Soon after, he and the boy set out to locate the mother of the child, who left shortly after the man disappeared.

  7. 7

    Thor (2011)

    Kenneth BranaghDP Haris ZambarloukosIMDb 7.0TMDB 6.8See in full on FrameThrower →

    The warrior Thor (Chris Hemsworth) is cast out of the fantastic realm of Asgard by his father Odin (Sir Anthony Hopkins) for his arrogance and sent to Earth to live amongst humans. Falling in love with scientist Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) teaches Thor much-needed lessons, and his new-found strength comes into play as a villain from his homeland sends dark forces toward Earth.

  8. 8

    Atonement (2007)

    Joe WrightDP Seamus McGarveyIMDb 7.8TMDB 7.6See in full on FrameThrower →

    When Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan), thirteen-years-old and an aspiring writer, sees her older sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley) and Robbie Turner (James McAvoy) at the fountain in front of the family estate, she misinterprets what is happening, thus setting into motion a series of misunderstandings and a childish pique that will have lasting repercussions for all of them. Robbie is the son of a family servant toward whom the family has always been kind. They paid for his time at Cambridge and now he plans on going to medical school. After the fountain incident, Briony reads a letter intended for Cecilia and concludes that Robbie is a deviant. When her cousin Lola (Juno Temple) is raped, she tells the Police that it was Robbie she saw committing the deed.

  9. 9

    Sunrise (1927)

    F. W. MurnauDP Karl StrussIMDb 8.1TMDB 7.8See in full on FrameThrower →

    In this fable-morality subtitled "A Song of Two Humans", the "evil" temptress is a city woman who bewitches farmer Anses and tries to convince him to murder his neglected wife, Indre.

  10. 10

    The Wrestler (2008)

    Darren AronofskyDP Maryse AlbertiIMDb 7.9TMDB 7.5See in full on FrameThrower →

    This is a drama about an aging professional wrestler, decades past his prime, who now barely gets by working small wrestling shows in VFW halls and as a part-time grocery store employee. As he faces health problems that may end his wrestling career for good he attempts to come to terms with his life outside the ring: by working full time at the grocery store, trying to reconcile with the daughter he abandoned in childhood and forming a closer bond with a stripper he has romantic feelings for. He struggles with his new life and an offer of a high-profile rematch with his 1980s arch-nemesis, The Ayatollah, which may be his ticket back to stardom.

What redemption films are made of

How much more often each element appears in a redemption frame than in an average frame from the catalogue. A ratio, not a share — neon sign is not in most frames, it is simply far more common here than anywhere else.

  • neon sign2.9×
  • cigarette2.4×
  • white shirt2.4×
  • fedora2.2×
  • wood paneling2.1×
  • coat2.1×
  • necktie1.9×
  • table1.9×

How redemption films are shot

Weaker signals than the objects above, and worth saying so: most dramatic genres skew dark and night-heavy, so these numbers separate redemption from the catalogue far more than they separate it from its neighbours.

  • 51%low keyvs 39% baseline
  • 51%nightvs 42% baseline

What breaks the pattern

Alien 3 (1992) is the least typical film here — it carries the least of what the rest of this list is made of. Which is either a failure of the genre label, or the most interesting film on the page.

Method

Every frame in the FrameThrower catalogue is tagged for shot size, lighting, time of day, camera angle, colour and the objects visible in it. This page aggregates those tags across 1,207 frames from 18 films carrying the redemption label, and compares each figure to the same measurement across the whole catalogue (404,689 frames). Films are ranked by how closely they match the theme’s over-indexed elements, weighted by how distinctive each element is; one film per series. Only films with at least 20 indexed frames and 500 TMDB votes are listed.

Machine-readable: /api/list/redemption

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