Film · 1990 · Films · 1990s
The Bonfire of the Vanities
Scored from 140 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1990s (4,082 peers).
Summary
A wealthy Wall Street bond trader's life unravels after he and his mistress take a wrong turn into the Bronx and are involved in a hit-and-run accident injuring a young Black man. As an opportunistic tabloid reporter, an ambitious prosecutor, and a publicity-seeking reverend seize on the case, the trader becomes the centerpiece of a media and political firestorm exposing the vanities of 1980s New York.
The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) is a film IMDb files under the comedy, drama and romance genres. Inside comedy it is classed as Satire.
Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 4,081 1990s films, not against the whole corpus. The calibrated figure is built from 140 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.
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 The Bonfire of the Vanities 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 140.
Cohort: Films · 1990s
