Film · 1998 · Films · 1990s
American History X
Scored from 1,046 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1990s (4,082 peers).
Summary
Derek Vinyard (Edward Norton) is a charismatic young neo-Nazi in Venice Beach, Los Angeles, who leads a skinhead crew until he is imprisoned for killing two men breaking into his truck. Three years later he returns home changed by what happened inside, to find his teenage brother Danny (Edward Furlong) repeating his slogans and drawing the crew's interest. The drama cuts between black-and-white flashbacks tracing Derek's radicalisation after his firefighter father's murder and colour scenes covering a single day and night after his release, framed by a paper the school principal, Dr. Sweeney, orders Danny to write about his brother. Derek has hours, not weeks, to pull Danny back out.
American History X (1998) is a film IMDb files under the drama, crime and thriller genres. Tony Kaye directed it. It runs 1h 59m and carries an R certificate. It was made in the United States. It stars Edward Norton, Edward Furlong and Beverly D'Angelo.
A second review pool sits behind it as well: 28,466 Rotten Tomatoes reviewers clear the same calibration test, and Rankquant scores them separately. 1,046 IMDb reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, and those are the ones the calibrated score reads; a separate, broader pool of 1,125 reviewers with at least two reviews each feeds the raw-average track. 4,081 other films from the 1990s form the cohort it is ranked inside.
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 American History X 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 1,046.
Cohort: Films · 1990s
