Film · 1970 · Films · 1970s
El Topo
Scored from 138 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1970s (2,406 peers).
Summary
A mysterious black-clad gunfighter rides through a surreal desert with his young son, leaving him behind to pursue a spiritual quest. To prove himself worthy of a woman he rescues, he sets out to challenge four master gunfighters living in the wilderness, each duel testing him as much philosophically as with a pistol. The journey transforms him through betrayal, death, and rebirth among a community of outcasts.
El Topo (1970) is a film IMDb files under the drama and western genres.
138 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 140 reviewers with at least two reviews each feeds the raw-average track. Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 2,405 1970s films, not against the whole corpus. A second review pool sits behind it as well: 1,156 Rotten Tomatoes reviewers clear the same calibration test, and Rankquant scores them separately.
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 El Topo 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 138.
Cohort: Films · 1970s
