Film · 2002 · Films · 2000s
The Twilight Samurai
Scored from 96 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2000s (7,847 peers).
Summary
Yoji Yamada's jidaigeki, from short stories by Shuhei Fujisawa, follows Seibei Iguchi, a low-ranking samurai clerk in the Unasaka clan in the closing years of the Tokugawa era. Widowed and left in debt by his wife's funeral, he goes straight home at dusk to his two small daughters and senile mother instead of drinking with colleagues, which earns him the nickname 'Twilight Seibei'. When Tomoe, the childhood friend he has always liked, returns to the district after escaping a brutal marriage, a duel fought on her behalf makes his neglected swordsmanship public knowledge. With the domain sliding into factional bloodletting, the elders find a use for a man they had written off.
The Twilight Samurai (2002) is a film IMDb files under the drama and romance genres. It was made in Japan. The runtime is 130 minutes. It is rated PG-13. Its listed language is Japanese.
Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 7,846 2000s films, not against the whole corpus. Only 96 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 101 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 Twilight Samurai 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 · 2000s (7,847 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 96.
Cohort: Films · 2000s
