Film · 1997 · Films · 1990s
The Castle
Scored from 108 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1990s (4,082 peers).
Summary
Darryl Kerrigan, a tow-truck driver, lives with his wife Sal and their children at 3 Highview Crescent, Coolaroo, a house he has extended and improved for years and which happens to sit at the end of a Melbourne Airport runway. When the airport's expansion brings a compulsory acquisition notice, Darryl refuses to sell on the principle that a man's home is his castle, and engages Dennis Denuto, a suburban solicitor whose grasp of constitutional law extends to 'the vibe'. Losses in the lower courts eventually bring the Kerrigans to a retired QC prepared to argue the 'just terms' clause of the Australian constitution. Rob Sitch directed this Australian comedy, narrated by Darryl's son Dale.
The Castle (1997) is a film IMDb files under the comedy and drama genres. Its country of origin is listed as Australia. It runs 1h 26m and carries a PG certificate. Inside comedy it is classed as Dramedy.
Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 865 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 108 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 115 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 Castle 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 108.
Cohort: Films · 1990s
