Film · 1990 · Films · 1990s
Jacob's Ladder
Scored from 354 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1990s (4,082 peers).
Summary
Tim Robbins plays Jacob Singer, a Vietnam veteran with a doctorate who sorts mail at a Brooklyn post office and lives with his girlfriend Jezzie, in Adrian Lyne's psychological horror film. Jacob's days fracture into hallucinations — faceless figures, writhing limbs, things glimpsed in subway cars and hospital corridors — and into memories of his dead son and of a night in 1971 when his unit was overrun in the Mekong Delta. When surviving members of the platoon report the same visions, they begin to suspect the Army did something to them, and Jacob starts digging. Bruce Joel Rubin's script keeps the line between delusion, conspiracy and something stranger deliberately unstable.
Jacob's Ladder is a 1990 drama, horror and mystery film. It was made in the United States. It is rated R. The runtime is 113 minutes.
354 IMDb reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, and those are the ones the calibrated score reads; a separate, broader pool of 367 reviewers with at least two reviews each feeds the raw-average track. The cohort it is ranked inside is 1990s films — 4,082 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 Jacob's Ladder 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 354.
Cohort: Films · 1990s
