Film · 1994 · Films · 1990s
To Live
Scored from 67 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1990s (4,082 peers).
Summary
Fugui is the pampered son of a wealthy landowning family in 1940s China who gambles away the ancestral house, losing his fortune and nearly his marriage to Jiazhen. Reduced to earning a living with a shadow-puppet troupe, he is conscripted into the Nationalist army, survives the civil war, and returns to a village being remade by the new Communist state. Across the following decades — land reform, the Great Leap Forward's backyard furnaces, and the Cultural Revolution — the family's survival keeps depending on how well they read the politics of the moment. Zhang Yimou directed this Mandarin-language drama, adapted from Yu Hua's novel, with Ge You and Gong Li.
Released in 1994, To Live is a drama and war film. It was made in China. It runs 2h 5m and carries a PG-13 certificate. Its listed language is Mandarin.
A second review pool sits behind it as well: 336 Rotten Tomatoes reviewers clear the same calibration test, and Rankquant scores them separately. The cohort it is ranked inside is 1990s films — 4,082 of them. Only 67 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 72 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 To Live 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 67.
Cohort: Films · 1990s
