Film · 1964 · Films · 1960s
Woman in the Dunes
Scored from 103 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1960s (1,929 peers).
Summary
Niki Jumpei, a Tokyo schoolteacher and amateur entomologist, spends a holiday collecting beetles in a remote stretch of seaside sand dunes and misses the last bus back. Villagers offer him a night's lodging in a shack at the bottom of a deep sand pit, reachable only by rope ladder, where a young widow lives alone and shovels sand every night. In the morning the ladder is gone, and he learns he is expected to stay and dig with her, keeping the encroaching sand from burying the house and the village behind it. Hiroshi Teshigahara directed this adaptation of Kōbō Abe's novel, shot in stark black and white with a score by Tōru Takemitsu.
Woman in the Dunes is a 1964 drama and thriller film. It runs 2h 27m. It was made in Japan, in Japanese.
The cohort it is ranked inside is 1960s films — 1,929 of them. The calibrated figure is built from 103 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 106 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 310 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 Woman in the Dunes 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 103.
Cohort: Films · 1960s
