Film · 1997 · Films · 1990s
Lost Highway
Scored from 387 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1990s (4,082 peers).
Summary
A jazz saxophonist and his wife begin receiving mysterious videotapes of their home, and after a violent incident he finds himself inexplicably transformed into a young auto mechanic entangled with a gangster's girlfriend. David Lynch's neo-noir spirals through identity, jealousy, and dreamlike doubling, refusing easy answers as the two storylines bleed into one another.
Lost Highway (1997) is a film IMDb files under the drama, mystery and thriller genres.
Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 4,081 1990s films, not against the whole corpus. The calibrated figure is built from 387 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 401 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 3,183 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 Lost Highway 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 387.
Cohort: Films · 1990s
