Film · 2005 · Films · 2000s
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
Scored from 43 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2000s (7,847 peers).
Summary
Alex Gibney's documentary, adapted from the book by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, traces Enron's rise from a Houston pipeline company to the seventh-largest corporation in America and its 2001 collapse into what was then the largest bankruptcy in US history. It centres on chairman Kenneth Lay, CEO Jeffrey Skilling and CFO Andrew Fastow, and on the machinery beneath the numbers: mark-to-market accounting that booked projected profits up front, off-books partnerships that hid debt, a rank-and-yank management culture, and compliant banks and analysts. Taped internal calls catch Enron traders joking about gaming California's deregulated power market during the 2000-01 blackouts. Reporters, former employees and executives carry the account, with narration by Peter Coyote.
Released in 2005, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is a biography, documentary and history film. Its certificate is PG-13. Its country of origin is listed as the United States. It runs 1h 50m.
Only 43 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 43 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 926 of whom clear the calibration test. The cohort it is ranked inside is 2000s films — 7,847 of them.
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 Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room 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 43.
Cohort: Films · 2000s
