Film · 1995 · Films · 1990s
The Celluloid Closet
Scored from 33 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1990s (4,082 peers).
Summary
Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's documentary, adapted from Vito Russo's book and narrated by Lily Tomlin, traces how Hollywood handled homosexuality across a century of filmmaking. Built from clips of more than a hundred pictures, it runs from the sissies of silent comedy through the Hays Code decades, when queerness survived only as coded gesture and innuendo, to later films in which openly gay characters were usually villains or victims. Interviewees including Gore Vidal, Tony Curtis, Shirley MacLaine, Susan Sarandon, Harvey Fierstein, Whoopi Goldberg and Tom Hanks describe what they wrote, played, or read between the lines.
Released in 1995, The Celluloid Closet is a documentary and history film. Its country of origin is listed as the United States. Its certificate is R. It runs 1h 42m.
Only 33 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 35 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track. The cohort it is ranked inside is 1990s films — 4,082 of them.
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 Celluloid Closet 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 33.
Cohort: Films · 1990s
