Film · 1999 · Films · 1990s
The Straight Story
Scored from 360 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1990s (4,082 peers).
Summary
Alvin Straight is a 73-year-old widower in Laurens, Iowa, moving on two canes, living with his daughter Rose and no longer allowed behind the wheel of a car. Told that his brother Lyle has had a stroke in Mount Zion, Wisconsin, and unwilling to be driven or flown, he bolts a trailer to a 1966 John Deere riding mower and starts a journey of several hundred miles at walking speed. Weather, hills, money and the strangers he meets at the roadside all slow a trip meant to end a decade of silence between the two men. David Lynch directed this account of a real crossing made in 1994, with Richard Farnsworth as Alvin.
Released in 1999, The Straight Story is a biography and drama film. It runs 1h 52m and carries a G certificate. Its country of origin is listed as the United States.
The cohort it is ranked inside is 1990s films — 4,082 of them. The calibrated figure is built from 360 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 377 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 Straight Story 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 360.
Cohort: Films · 1990s
