Film · 1995 · Films · 1990s
The King of Masks
Scored from 37 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1990s (4,082 peers).
Summary
Wu Tianming's film, set in 1930s Sichuan, follows Wang Bianlian (Zhu Xu), an ageing riverside street performer known as the King of Masks for his command of bian lian, the Sichuan opera art of switching painted silk faces in an eyeblink. Custom allows him to pass the secret only to a male heir, and, childless in old age, he buys an eight-year-old from a market where desperate families sell their children. The boy, nicknamed Doggie, turns out to be a girl, and the discovery sets Wang's affection against the tradition he has served all his life. A Mandarin-language drama of apprenticeship, poverty and inherited rules.
Released in 1995, The King of Masks is a drama film. Its listed language is Mandarin. The runtime is 101 minutes. It was made in China.
4,081 other films from the 1990s form the cohort it is ranked inside. A second review pool sits behind it as well: 126 Rotten Tomatoes reviewers clear the same calibration test, and Rankquant scores them separately. Only 37 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 38 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 King of Masks 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 37.
Cohort: Films · 1990s
