Film · 1991 · Films · 1990s
Raise the Red Lantern
Scored from 102 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1990s (4,082 peers).
Summary
In 1920s northern China, nineteen-year-old Songlian abandons her university studies after her father's death and the family's ruin, and is married off as the fourth wife of the wealthy Master Chen. Life inside his walled compound runs on ritual: each evening red lanterns are lit outside the quarters of the mistress the Master has chosen for the night, and with them come foot massages, control of the household menu and the deference of the servants. Songlian is drawn into manoeuvring against the other wives — among them the outwardly gracious Zhuoyun and the former opera singer Meishan — and against her own maid, Yan'er. Zhang Yimou's drama, starring Gong Li, was shot in a Qing-era merchant compound in Shanxi.
Raise the Red Lantern (1991) is a film IMDb files under the drama and romance genres. The runtime is 125 minutes. It is rated PG. It was made in China. Its listed language is Mandarin Chinese.
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 105 reviewers with at least two reviews each feeds the raw-average track. A second review pool sits behind it as well: 927 Rotten Tomatoes reviewers clear the same calibration test, and Rankquant scores them separately. 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 Raise the Red Lantern 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 102.
Cohort: Films · 1990s
