Film · 1996 · Films · 1990s
Secrets & Lies
Scored from 145 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1990s (4,082 peers).
Summary
Hortense Cumberbatch, a Black optometrist in London, decides after her adoptive mother's death to trace her birth mother, and the records lead her to Cynthia Purley — a white, near-broke factory worker who has no idea she has been found. Cynthia shares a cramped East End house with her sullen daughter Roxanne, a council street sweeper, while her brother Maurice, a portrait photographer, keeps his distance in the suburbs with his brittle wife Monica. The two women begin meeting in secret as Roxanne's twenty-first birthday party approaches, an occasion that gathers the whole family into one room. Mike Leigh built the drama through improvisation with his cast, and it won the Palme d'Or at Cannes.
Secrets & Lies (1996) is a film IMDb files under the comedy and drama genres. Its country of origin is listed as the United Kingdom. It runs 2h 16m and carries an R certificate.
Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 576 of whom clear the calibration test. 4,081 other films from the 1990s form the cohort it is ranked inside. The calibrated figure is built from 145 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 151 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead.
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 Secrets & Lies 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 145.
Cohort: Films · 1990s
