Film · 1962 · Films · 1960s
Lonely Are the Brave
Scored from 102 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1960s (1,929 peers).
Summary
Kirk Douglas plays Jack Burns, an itinerant cowboy who still rides, ropes and cuts fences in an early-1960s New Mexico of highways, barbed wire and police radios. Learning that his friend Paul Bondi is jailed in Albuquerque for helping men cross the border illegally, Burns picks a bar fight to get himself locked up so he can break them both out. When Bondi refuses to run, Burns escapes alone with his skittish mare Whisky and heads for the Sandia Mountains and the border. Sheriff Morey Johnson, played by Walter Matthau, mounts a motorized pursuit, in a black-and-white western scripted by Dalton Trumbo from Edward Abbey's novel The Brave Cowboy.
Lonely Are the Brave (1962) is a film IMDb files under the drama and western genres. It is rated Approved. It was made in the United States. The runtime is 107 minutes.
A second review pool sits behind it as well: 100 Rotten Tomatoes reviewers clear the same calibration test, and Rankquant scores them separately. Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 1,928 1960s films, not against the whole corpus. 102 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 102 reviewers with at least two reviews each feeds the raw-average track.
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 Lonely Are the Brave 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 102.
Cohort: Films · 1960s
