Film · 1991 · Films · 1990s
A Brighter Summer Day
Scored from 38 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1990s (4,082 peers).
Summary
Taipei, 1960: fourteen-year-old Xiao Si'r attends night school after missing a place in the day programme, the son of a civil servant who brought the family from Shanghai when the Nationalists lost the mainland. The children of these displaced households have organised into gangs, the Little Park Boys and the 217s, feuding over pool halls, concert stages and turf while their parents live with surveillance and the threat of political denunciation. Si'r drifts between the Little Park crowd, his family's worsening position and Ming, the girlfriend of the gang's absent leader Honey. Edward Yang's four-hour Taiwanese drama, set among Elvis records and military-dependants' housing, draws on a 1961 killing.
A Brighter Summer Day is a 1991 crime, drama and romance film. It plays in Mandarin. The runtime is 237 minutes. Its certificate is Not Rated.
Only 38 of its IMDb reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, so the calibrated figure rests on a thin sample; a broader pool of 44 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track. Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 4,081 1990s films, not against the whole corpus. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 88 of whom clear the calibration test.
How the score was built
We compare the reviewers of this title against every other title those same people reviewed. Each review is scored relative to the reviewer's own baseline — a 7/10 from a hard grader sits well above their average, while a 7/10 from a generous grader sits below theirs. Every reviewer then counts the same, so the result is a calibrated consensus rather than a raw average.
- Global percentile
- Where A Brighter Summer Day lands against every title we rank.
- In-cohort percentile
- The same comparison narrowed to its cohort — titles of the same format released in the same decade. A 1970s film is judged against 1970s films, not against last year's streaming series. Ranked against Films · 1990s (4,082 titles).
- AI-adjusted percentile
- The same reviewer-normalized score, corrected for how much confidence the sample supports: thin samples are pulled toward the corpus average. Each title keeps the share n / (n + 53) of its measured distance from the average, where n is its calibrated-reviewer count, and the result is ranked on the same scale as the global percentile.53 is the median sample size across everything we rank. Here n is 38.
Cohort: Films · 1990s
