Film · 1958 · Films · 1950s
The Lineup
Scored from 64 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1950s (561 peers).
Summary
Dancer, a well-dressed psychopath with no impulse control, and Julian, the older partner who coaches him and writes his victims' last words in a notebook, come to San Francisco to collect heroin that a syndicate has planted in the luggage of tourists returning from Asia. With their local driver Sandy McLain, they work down a list of unwitting couriers on a tight schedule, killing anyone who delays them. Lieutenant Ben Guthrie and Inspector Al Quine of the San Francisco police pick up the same trail from a dockside shooting. Don Siegel directed this crime thriller, spun off from the radio and television series and shot on location, including the then-unfinished Embarcadero Freeway.
Released in 1958, The Lineup is a crime, drama and film-noir film. The runtime is 86 minutes. Its certificate is Approved. Its country of origin is listed as the United States.
Only 64 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 64 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track. 560 other films from the 1950s form the cohort it is ranked inside. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 37 of whom clear the calibration test.
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 Lineup 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 · 1950s (561 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 64.
Cohort: Films · 1950s
