Film · 1967 · Films · 1960s
In the Heat of the Night
Scored from 271 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1960s (1,929 peers).
Summary
Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier), a Philadelphia homicide detective, is waiting for a train in Sparta, Mississippi, when a wealthy Northern industrialist is found beaten to death in the street and Tibbs is arrested on no evidence but his being a Black man with money in his wallet. Once his badge is confirmed his department loans him to the local force, and Norman Jewison's crime drama becomes a murder investigation run in the teeth of a town that wants him gone. Chief Bill Gillespie (Rod Steiger) wants a fast arrest; Tibbs keeps taking apart the suspects Gillespie settles on, including one of the county's richest white men. The case proceeds as an antagonistic partnership, each man testing how far the other will bend.
In the Heat of the Night (1967) is a film IMDb files under the drama, mystery and thriller genres. It runs 1h 49m. Its country of origin is listed as the United States.
The calibrated figure is built from 271 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 275 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.
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 In the Heat of the Night 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 271.
Cohort: Films · 1960s
