Film · 1964 · Films · 1960s
The Pawnbroker
Scored from 85 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1960s (1,929 peers).
Summary
Sol Nazerman is a Jewish survivor of the Nazi camps, where his wife and children died, who now runs a pawnshop in Harlem and deals without pity in the small desperations of his customers. Emotionally shut down, he holds at arm's length a widowed fellow refugee, a social worker who takes an interest in him, and Jesus Ortiz, his young Puerto Rican assistant, who wants to learn the trade. The shop, whose books he has chosen not to examine, is a front for a local racketeer whose money comes from prostitution. As the anniversary of his family's death nears, memories of the camps begin cutting into his days. Sidney Lumet's adaptation of Edward Lewis Wallant's novel stars Rod Steiger, with a score by Quincy Jones.
Released in 1964, The Pawnbroker is a drama film. The runtime is 116 minutes. It was made in the United States.
A second review pool sits behind it as well: 140 Rotten Tomatoes reviewers clear the same calibration test, and Rankquant scores them separately. Only 85 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 88 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track. 1,928 other films from the 1960s form the cohort it is ranked inside.
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 Pawnbroker 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 85.
Cohort: Films · 1960s
