Film · 1962 · Films · 1960s
Cape Fear
Scored from 172 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1960s (1,929 peers).
Summary
Sam Bowden (Gregory Peck), a Southern lawyer with a wife and teenage daughter, finds Max Cady (Robert Mitchum) waiting outside the courthouse eight years after Bowden's testimony sent him to prison for assault. Cady has spent the sentence studying the law, and he shadows the family — idling near the house, appearing wherever they go, poisoning the dog — while staying clear of anything he can be charged with. Police chief Mark Dutton (Martin Balsam) can only lean on him so far, and a private detective offers rougher remedies, so Bowden begins working outside the rules his career is built on. J. Lee Thompson's black-and-white thriller, scored by Bernard Herrmann, presses on how far a lawful man will go when the law stops protecting him.
Released in 1962, Cape Fear is a drama and thriller film. It runs 1h 45m. Its country of origin is listed as the United States.
The calibrated figure is built from 172 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 173 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. The cohort it is ranked inside is 1960s films — 1,929 of them.
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 Cape Fear 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 172.
Cohort: Films · 1960s
