Film · 1991 · Films · 1990s
Shakes the Clown
Scored from 35 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1990s (4,082 peers).
Summary
A washed-up clown living in Las Vegas struggles with depression and existential emptiness while navigating the darker side of show business and circus culture.
Shakes the Clown is a 1991 comedy, crime and drama film. It is rated R. It was made in the United States. The runtime is 89 minutes.
A second review pool sits behind it as well: 172 Rotten Tomatoes reviewers clear the same calibration test, and Rankquant scores them separately. Only 35 of its IMDb reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, so the calibrated figure rests on a thin sample; a broader pool of 36 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track. 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 Shakes the Clown 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 35.
Cohort: Films · 1990s
