Film · 1975 · Films · 1970s
Hard Times
Scored from 109 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1970s (2,406 peers).
Summary
Walter Hill's directorial debut follows Chaney, a laconic drifter who rides a boxcar into Louisiana during the Great Depression with almost nothing and finds he can earn a living with his fists. In New Orleans he falls in with Speed, a fast-talking gambler who books illegal bare-knuckle matches in warehouses and back lots, and with Poe, an opium-addled cutman hired to patch him up. As Chaney's reputation grows and he edges into a guarded romance with a local woman, Lucy, Speed's debts and appetite for a big score draw both men into a contest with a wealthier rival promoter. A spare period action drama staged around long, largely unscored fights.
Hard Times is a 1975 crime, drama and sport film. Its certificate is PG. Its country of origin is listed as the United States. It runs 1h 37m.
Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 2,405 1970s films, not against the whole corpus. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 5 of whom clear the calibration test. The calibrated figure is built from 109 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 113 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 Hard Times 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 · 1970s (2,406 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 109.
Cohort: Films · 1970s
