Film · 2011 · Films · 2010s
Bobby Fischer Against the World
Scored from 28 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2010s (13,059 peers).
Summary
Liz Garbus's documentary follows the American chess champion Bobby Fischer from a Brooklyn childhood with his mother Regina, through his run as a teenage grandmaster, to the 1972 world championship in Reykjavik against the Soviet titleholder Boris Spassky. Assembled from archive film, photographs and news coverage, it shows a match the press turned into a Cold War proxy and that Fischer nearly abandoned over demands about cameras, prize money and playing conditions. Interviews with players and friends including Garry Kasparov, Susan Polgar, Anthony Saidy and Malcolm Gladwell weigh his genius at the board against the suspicion and antisemitism of his later years. It was produced for HBO.
Bobby Fischer Against the World is a 2011 biography, documentary and history film. Its country of origin is listed as the United States. It runs 1h 25m.
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 28 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track. The cohort it is ranked inside is 2010s films — 13,059 of them. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 123 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 Bobby Fischer Against the World 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 · 2010s (13,059 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 · 2010s
