Film · 1963 · Films · 1960s
High and Low
Scored from 186 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1960s (1,929 peers).
Summary
Kingo Gondo, a senior executive at a Yokohama shoe company who has mortgaged everything to buy control of the firm, takes a call telling him his son has been kidnapped. The boy actually seized is the chauffeur's son, taken by mistake, and the kidnapper demands the ransom anyway — a sum that would bankrupt Gondo and cost him the company. The first half unfolds almost entirely inside Gondo's air-conditioned hilltop house as he, his wife and the police argue over an impossible decision; the second follows Inspector Tokura's manhunt down into the heat of the city below. Akira Kurosawa directed this widescreen crime drama, adapted from Ed McBain's novel King's Ransom, with Toshiro Mifune as Gondo.
Released in 1963, High and Low is a crime, drama and mystery film. It plays in Japanese. Its country of origin is listed as Japan. It runs 2h 23m.
The calibrated figure is built from 186 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 190 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 1,928 1960s films, not against the whole corpus. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 541 of whom clear the calibration test.
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 High and Low 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 · 1960s (1,929 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 186.
Cohort: Films · 1960s
