Film · 1997 · Films · 1990s
Fireworks
Scored from 105 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1990s (4,082 peers).
Summary
Detective Yoshitaka Nishi has a wife dying of leukaemia, a partner left in a wheelchair by a shooting he feels responsible for, and debts to yakuza loan sharks. He leaves the police force and, with money taken in a bank robbery, sets out on a wandering trip with his wife while quietly sending funds to his paralysed colleague Horibe, who has taken up painting, and to the widow of an officer killed on the same case. Takeshi Kitano writes, directs, edits and stars, cutting between long deadpan silences and sudden violence, and the canvases attributed to Horibe are Kitano's own paintings. Scored by Joe Hisaishi, it won the Golden Lion at Venice.
Fireworks is a 1997 crime, drama and romance film. It was made in Japan. It plays in Japanese. It runs 1h 43m.
Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 13 of whom clear the calibration test. Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 4,081 1990s films, not against the whole corpus. The calibrated figure is built from 105 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 112 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead.
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 Fireworks 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 105.
Cohort: Films · 1990s
