Film · 1975 · Films · 1970s
Dog Day Afternoon
Scored from 351 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1970s (2,406 peers).
Summary
Sidney Lumet's crime drama reconstructs a real Brooklyn robbery on a sweltering afternoon in August 1972. Sonny Wortzik (Al Pacino) and his partner Sal walk into a savings bank near closing time and find the vault all but empty; minutes later the block is sealed off by police, television crews and a growing crowd that starts cheering for the robbers. Holding a handful of tellers, Sonny negotiates on the sidewalk with a detective while the reason he needs the money — surgery for his lover, Leon — is broadcast along with the rest of his private life. The siege plays out almost in real time, mostly inside one branch office.
Dog Day Afternoon (1975) is a film IMDb files under the biography, crime and drama genres. It runs 2h 5m and carries an R certificate. Its country of origin is listed as the United States.
The cohort it is ranked inside is 1970s films — 2,406 of them. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 3,568 of whom clear the calibration test. The calibrated figure is built from 351 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 360 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 Dog Day Afternoon 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 351.
Cohort: Films · 1970s
