Film · 1990 · Films · 1990s
Close-Up
Scored from 63 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1990s (4,082 peers).
Summary
In late-1980s Tehran, Hossain Sabzian, an unemployed film enthusiast reading the published screenplay of Mohsen Makhmalbaf's The Cyclist on a bus, is taken by a fellow passenger for Makhmalbaf himself. He does not correct her, and over the following weeks he lets her middle-class family, the Ahankhahs, believe he will shoot his next picture in their house and cast their sons. When they grow suspicious he is arrested for fraud. Abbas Kiarostami filmed the actual trial and then had Sabzian, the Ahankhahs and the journalist who broke the story re-enact the events leading up to it, all playing themselves. The result is a docufiction in which what Sabzian wanted from the deception is argued out by the real participants.
Close-Up (1990) is a film IMDb files under the biography, crime and drama genres. It is rated Not Rated. The runtime is 98 minutes. Its listed language is Persian. It was made in Iran.
4,081 other films from the 1990s form the cohort it is ranked inside. Only 63 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 67 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track. A second review pool sits behind it as well: 167 Rotten Tomatoes reviewers clear the same calibration test, and Rankquant scores them separately.
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 Close-Up 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 63.
Cohort: Films · 1990s
