Film · 1997 · Films · 1990s
Contact
Scored from 567 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1990s (4,082 peers).
Summary
Radio astronomer Dr. Ellie Arroway detects the first confirmed signal from an extraterrestrial civilization. She leads an international effort to decipher the transmission and construct a machine to make contact with the alien intelligence.
Contact is a 1997 science fiction, drama and mystery film directed by Robert Zemeckis. Jodie Foster, Matthew McConaughey and Tom Skerritt head the billed cast. Its certificate is PG. Its country of origin is listed as the United States. It runs 2h 30m.
The calibrated figure is built from 567 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 595 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 Contact 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 567.
Cohort: Films · 1990s
