Film · 1979 · Films · 1970s
The In-Laws
Scored from 89 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1970s (2,406 peers).
Summary
Days before their children's wedding, mild-mannered Manhattan dentist Sheldon Kornpett meets Vince Ricardo, the groom's father, who claims to work for the CIA and behaves like it. Vince talks Sheldon into one small favor involving a satchel, and the dentist finds himself dodging gunfire in lower Manhattan, fleeing the police, and eventually flying to a Latin American dictatorship on business involving stolen Treasury engraving plates. Arthur Hiller's comedy, written by Andrew Bergman, plays Alan Arkin's escalating panic against Peter Falk's unflappable calm, and supplies the much-quoted advice to run 'serpentine' under fire.
Released in 1979, The In-Laws is an action, adventure and comedy film. It runs 1h 43m and carries a PG certificate. It was made in the United States.
A second review pool sits behind it as well: 190 Rotten Tomatoes reviewers clear the same calibration test, and Rankquant scores them separately. Only 89 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 91 reviewers with at least two reviews 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 In-Laws 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 89.
Cohort: Films · 1970s
