Film · 1958 · Films · 1950s
A Tale of Two Cities
Scored from 26 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1950s (561 peers).
Summary
Dr Manette, released after eighteen years in the Bastille, is brought to London by his daughter Lucie, where the household becomes entangled with Charles Darnay, a French émigré who has renounced his aristocratic name and stands trial for treason at the Old Bailey. His acquittal owes much to Sydney Carton, a dissipated English barrister who resembles him closely enough to wreck the identification — and who falls hopelessly in love with Lucie himself. When revolution breaks out, the Defarges' wine shop in Saint Antoine keeps its register of scores to settle, and a letter from an old family servant draws Darnay back to Paris and into a Republican prison. Ralph Thomas's black-and-white Dickens adaptation stars Dirk Bogarde as Carton.
A Tale of Two Cities is a 1958 drama, history and romance film. Its country of origin is listed as the United Kingdom. It runs 1h 57m.
The cohort it is ranked inside is 1950s films — 561 of them. Only 26 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 26 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 1 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 A Tale of Two Cities 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 · 1950s (561 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 26.
Cohort: Films · 1950s
