Film · 2008 · Films · 2000s
Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father
Scored from 123 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2000s (7,847 peers).
Summary
Filmmaker Kurt Kuenne's documentary began as a memory album for a child. After his childhood friend Andrew Bagby, a young doctor, was murdered in Pennsylvania in 2001, Kuenne drove across North America interviewing nearly everyone who had known him, intending to hand the finished film to Bagby's infant son, Zachary. The prime suspect, Bagby's former girlfriend Shirley Turner, had fled to Newfoundland and announced she was pregnant with his child; the film follows Andrew's parents, David and Kathleen Bagby, as they move to Canada and press its courts over bail and custody. Kuenne narrates in the first person, addressing Zachary directly throughout.
Released in 2008, Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father is a biography, crime and documentary film. The runtime is 93 minutes. It was made in the United States.
7,846 other films from the 2000s form the cohort it is ranked inside. 123 IMDb reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, and those are the ones the calibrated score reads; a separate, broader pool of 136 reviewers with at least two reviews each feeds the raw-average track.
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 Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father 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 123.
Cohort: Films · 2000s
