Film · 2002 · Films · 2000s
City of God
Scored from 781 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2000s (7,847 peers).
Summary
Set in a favela of Rio de Janeiro, the film chronicles the rise of a brutal drug lord known as Li'l Zé and the gang wars that reshape the community over several decades. Narrated by a young photographer named Rocket, the story interweaves multiple characters' perspectives as they navigate poverty, crime, and violence in the slums.
City of God is a 2002 drama, crime and thriller film directed by Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund. Its certificate is R. Alexandre Rodrigues, Leandro Firmino da Hora and Phellipe Haagensen head the billed cast. It plays in Portuguese. Its country of origin is listed as Brazil. It runs 2h 10m.
The calibrated figure is built from 781 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 880 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. 7,846 other films from the 2000s form the cohort it is ranked inside. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 12,931 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 City of God 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 · 2000s (7,847 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 781.
Cohort: Films · 2000s
