Abstract: Gelatin is a very important natural biopolymer with wide range of sources, low cost, good film-forming, biocompatibility, biodegradability and so on.However, the pure gelatin film is poor in thermal stability and mechanical strength, water-sensitive, perishable defects, thus it need to be modified.Composite films can be created by mixing gelatin with protein, carbohydrate and lipid, or additives, which can improve the performance of gelatin-based films, so that the gelatin-based films have broad applications. The progress of gelatin-based composite films and their application in food packaging were briefly reviewed in this paper.