Film · 1991 · Films · 1990s
Cape Fear
Scored from 395 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1990s (4,082 peers).
Summary
After serving 14 years in prison, Max Cady tracks down Sam Bowden, the attorney he blames for his conviction, and begins systematically terrorizing Bowden's wife and teenage daughter. As Cady exploits legal loopholes to stay just out of reach, Bowden's increasingly desperate attempts to protect his family push him outside the law and toward a violent confrontation.
Cape Fear is a 1991 crime, drama and thriller film.
The calibrated figure is built from 395 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 402 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 4,081 1990s films, not against the whole corpus.
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 · 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 395.
Cohort: Films · 1990s
