Film · 1977 · Films · 1970s
The Duellists
Scored from 109 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1970s (2,406 peers).
Summary
Ridley Scott's first feature, adapted from Joseph Conrad's story 'The Duel,' follows two officers of Napoleon's army across fifteen years of the Empire. In Strasbourg in 1800, Lieutenant d'Hubert (Keith Carradine) is sent to place the hot-tempered Lieutenant Feraud (Harvey Keitel) under arrest for wounding a civilian in a duel; Feraud treats the errand as a personal insult and challenges him. Their private quarrel is renewed with sabre, sword and pistol whenever campaigns and promotions bring them into the same garrison, from provincial towns to the retreat from Russia, while d'Hubert tries to build a life outside it. A period drama shot largely in natural light.
The Duellists is a 1977 drama and war film. It is rated PG. The runtime is 101 minutes. It was made in the United Kingdom.
109 IMDb reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, and those are the ones the calibrated score reads; a separate, broader pool of 113 reviewers with at least two reviews each feeds the raw-average track. The cohort it is ranked inside is 1970s films — 2,406 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 Duellists 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 109.
Cohort: Films · 1970s
