Film · 1989 · Films · 1980s
Dead Poets Society
Scored from 670 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1980s (3,141 peers).
Summary
At a prestigious all-boys boarding school in the 1950s, an unconventional English teacher challenges his students to think independently and embrace life's possibilities, inspiring them to question authority and pursue their passions despite parental expectations and institutional pressure.
Dead Poets Society is a 1989 drama and coming-of-age film directed by Peter Weir. It runs 2h 8m. Its certificate is PG. Robin Williams, Robert Sean Leonard and Ethan Hawke head the billed cast. Its country of origin is listed as the United States.
The calibrated figure is built from 670 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 722 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 11,931 of whom clear the calibration test. The cohort it is ranked inside is 1980s films — 3,141 of them.
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 Dead Poets Society 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 670.
Cohort: Films · 1980s
