Film · 1996 · Films · 1990s
Lone Star
Scored from 152 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1990s (4,082 peers).
Summary
A skull, a sheriff's badge and a Masonic ring turn up on an abandoned army firing range outside Frontera, a Texas border town, and Sheriff Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper) reopens a disappearance from the 1950s. The remains point to Charlie Wade, the extortionist lawman who vanished after clashing with Sam's father, the locally revered Buddy Deeds, whose name is about to go on a memorial. Sifting the Anglo, Mexican American and Black versions of the county's past, Sam also resumes a romance with schoolteacher Pilar Cruz that their parents once broke up. John Sayles wrote and directed this mystery, which slips between present and past within single unbroken shots.
Released in 1996, Lone Star is a drama, mystery and western film. The runtime is 135 minutes. Its certificate is R. Its country of origin is listed as the United States.
The calibrated figure is built from 152 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 161 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. 4,081 other films from the 1990s form the cohort it is ranked inside.
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 Lone Star 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 152.
Cohort: Films · 1990s
