Film · 1961 · Films · 1960s
Yojimbo
Scored from 231 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1960s (1,929 peers).
Summary
A masterless samurai walks into a dusty village in 1860 Japan and finds it split between two protection rackets — one led by Seibei and backed by the silk merchant, the other by Ushitora and backed by the sake brewer — while the coffin maker does the only steady business in town. Calling himself Sanjuro, he takes a room at Gonji's tavern, hires his sword out to each side in turn and manipulates them into wiping one another out. The return of Ushitora's brother Unosuke, who carries a revolver, upsets the ronin's arithmetic. Akira Kurosawa directs Toshiro Mifune in a jidaigeki played as a sardonic and brutal comedy.
Released in 1961, Yojimbo is an action, drama and thriller film. Its certificate is Not Rated. It was made in Japan, in Japanese. It runs 1h 50m.
Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 2,101 of whom clear the calibration test. The calibrated figure is built from 231 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 236 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. 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 Yojimbo 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 231.
Cohort: Films · 1960s
