Film · 2004 · Films · 2000s
The Hidden Blade
Scored from 27 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2000s (7,847 peers).
Summary
Munezo Katagiri is a low-ranking samurai in the small northern domain of Unasaka in the 1860s, where clan warriors are being drilled in Western rifles and cannon as the shogunate's order gives way. Diminished at home and bound by rank, he cannot admit his feelings for Kie, a former maid in his household now unhappily married into a merchant family. When his old fencing-school friend Yaichiro Hazama is jailed for conspiracy and then breaks out, the clan orders Munezo to kill him, and hints that he should use the secret technique their swordmaster taught him. Yoji Yamada's period drama, adapted from Shuhei Fujisawa's stories and starring Masatoshi Nagase and Takako Matsu, is the second film in his samurai trilogy.
The Hidden Blade (2004) is a film IMDb files under the drama, history and romance genres. Its country of origin is listed as Japan. The runtime is 128 minutes. Its listed language is Japanese.
7,846 other films from the 2000s form the cohort it is ranked inside. Only 27 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 27 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track.
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 Hidden Blade 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 · 2000s (7,847 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 27.
Cohort: Films · 2000s
