Film · 1988 · Films · 1980s
A Short Film About Killing
Scored from 53 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1980s (3,141 peers).
Summary
Jacek Łazar, a sullen twenty-year-old adrift in grey mid-1980s Warsaw, wanders the city for a day and then kills a coarse, casually cruel taxi driver in a long and clumsy attack. Piotr Balicki, an idealistic lawyer who has just passed his bar examination arguing against the deterrent value of punishment, is assigned as his defence counsel. Krzysztof Kieślowski's Polish drama observes the crime and then the legal machinery that answers it in near-documentary detail, refusing to let either pass quickly. Sławomir Idziak shot it through heavy green and amber filters that darken the edges of almost every frame, and the film is the feature-length expansion of the fifth part of the television cycle Dekalog.
Released in 1988, A Short Film About Killing is a crime and drama film. Its country of origin is listed as Poland. It plays in Polish. It runs 1h 24m.
Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 204 of whom clear the calibration test. The cohort it is ranked inside is 1980s films — 3,141 of them. Only 53 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 53 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track.
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 Short Film About Killing 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 · 1980s (3,141 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 53.
Cohort: Films · 1980s
