Film · 1998 · Films · 1990s
Zakhm
Scored from 28 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1990s (4,082 peers).
Summary
Mahesh Bhatt's semi-autobiographical Hindi drama opens in a Mumbai convulsed by Hindu-Muslim rioting, where filmmaker Ajay Desai (Ajay Devgn) keeps vigil over his mother as she lies dying of burns suffered in the violence. In flashbacks he remembers her (Pooja Bhatt) as the Muslim mistress of a Hindu film producer (Nagarjuna) who loved her but never publicly gave her his name, and a childhood spent between adoration and shame. In the present, her wish to be buried according to Muslim rites collides with his brother's standing in a Hindu nationalist party fronted by the demagogue Subodh Malgonkar (Ashutosh Rana). Ajay is left to weigh what he owes his mother against what his family and the city will permit.
Zakhm is a 1998 drama film. Its country of origin is listed as India. It plays in Hindi.
Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 4,081 1990s films, not against the whole corpus. Only 28 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 29 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 Zakhm 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 28.
Cohort: Films · 1990s
