Film · 1974 · Films · 1970s
Chinatown
Scored from 560 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1970s (2,406 peers).
Summary
In 1930s Los Angeles, private detective J.J. Gittes is hired to follow a man suspected of infidelity. His investigation uncovers a conspiracy involving water rights, municipal corruption, and a powerful family's secrets. As Gittes pursues the truth, he becomes entangled in a dangerous web of deception and murder with far-reaching consequences.
Chinatown is a 1974 crime, drama and mystery film directed by Roman Polanski. Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway and John Huston head the billed cast. Its country of origin is listed as the United States. Its certificate is R. It runs 2h 10m.
2,405 other films from the 1970s form the cohort it is ranked inside. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 4,862 of whom clear the calibration test. The calibrated figure is built from 560 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 575 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead.
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 Chinatown 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 · 1970s (2,406 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 560.
Cohort: Films · 1970s
