Film · 1961 · Films · 1960s
The Hustler
Scored from 218 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1960s (1,929 peers).
Summary
Robert Rossen's black-and-white drama, adapted from Walter Tevis's novel, follows 'Fast Eddie' Felson (Paul Newman), a young pool hustler working small-town tables with his partner Charlie before arriving in New York to challenge the game's reigning figure, Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason). Their match runs more than a day and ends with Eddie's stake gone. Adrift afterwards, he takes up with Sarah Packard (Piper Laurie), a lame, hard-drinking woman he meets in a bus station coffee shop, and accepts the backing of Bert Gordon (George C. Scott), a gambler who bankrolls players for three-quarters of the winnings and tells Eddie he is a born loser.
Released in 1961, The Hustler is a drama and sport film. It runs 2h 14m. Its country of origin is listed as the United States.
Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 2 of whom clear the calibration test. 1,928 other films from the 1960s form the cohort it is ranked inside. The calibrated figure is built from 218 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 230 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 Hustler 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 · 1960s (1,929 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 218.
Cohort: Films · 1960s
