Film · 1975 · Films · 1970s
Sholay
Scored from 132 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1970s (2,406 peers).
Summary
Thakur Baldev Singh, a retired police officer living near the village of Ramgarh, recruits two petty crooks he once arrested, Jai and Veeru, to capture the dacoit Gabbar Singh, who terrorises the district and has his own history with the Thakur. The pair arrive as mercenaries and are gradually drawn into village life, Veeru courting the voluble tonga driver Basanti while Jai is quietly drawn to the Thakur's widowed daughter-in-law Radha. Ramesh Sippy's Hindi action drama, scripted by Salim–Javed, transplants the conventions of the American and Italian western to rural India, with Amitabh Bachchan, Dharmendra, Sanjeev Kumar, Hema Malini and Amjad Khan.
Released in 1975, Sholay is an action, adventure and comedy film. It runs 3h 24m. It plays in Hindi. Its country of origin is listed as India.
Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 477 of whom clear the calibration test. The calibrated figure is built from 132 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 142 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 2,405 1970s films, not against the whole corpus.
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 Sholay 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 · 1970s (2,406 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 132.
Cohort: Films · 1970s
