Abstract: Film cooling flows are characterized by a row of jets injected at an angle from the blade surface or endwalls into the heated crossflow. The resulting flowfield is quite complex, and accurate predictions of the flow and heat transfer have been difficult to obtain, particularly in the near field of the injected jet. The flowfield is characterized by a spectrum of vortical structures including the dominant kidney vortex, the horse‐shoe vortex, the wake vortices and the shear layer vortices. These anisotropic and unsteady structures are not well represented by empirical or ad‐hoc turbulence models, and lead to inaccurate predictions in the near field of the jet. In this paper, a variety of modeling approaches have been reviewed, and the limitations of these approaches are identified. Recent emergence of Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) and Large Eddy Simulation (LES) tools allow the resolution of the coherent structure dynamics, and it is shown in this paper, that such approaches provide improved predictions over that obtained with turbulence models.