Film · 1991 · Films · 1990s
Dogfight
Scored from 46 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1990s (4,082 peers).
Summary
Nancy Savoca's period drama, set in San Francisco in November 1963. Corporal Eddie Birdlace and three fellow Marines, hours from shipping out to Vietnam, each pay into a pot for a 'dogfight' — a party where every man brings a date and whoever brings the woman the others judge ugliest takes the money. Birdlace recruits Rose Fenny, a shy waitress in her mother's diner who plays folk guitar, idolises Joan Baez and has never really been asked out. River Phoenix and Lili Taylor play the pair, and the film follows them through a single night in the city after Rose works out what the party actually is.
Dogfight (1991) is a film IMDb files under the comedy, drama and romance genres. Its country of origin is listed as the United States. Its certificate is R. It runs 1h 34m.
Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 277 of whom clear the calibration test. The cohort it is ranked inside is 1990s films — 4,082 of them. Only 46 of its IMDb reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, so the calibrated figure rests on a thin sample; a broader pool of 49 reviewers with at least two reviews 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 Dogfight 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 46.
Cohort: Films · 1990s
