Film · 2001 · Films · 2000s
Failan
Scored from 32 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2000s (7,847 peers).
Summary
Lee Kang-jae is a middle-aged nobody in an Incheon gang, peddling pirated videos and running errands for men who once served under him, and now under pressure to serve a prison term for a killing he did not commit. A summons sends him to a coastal town to deal with the death of Failan, a young Chinese woman who came to Korea in search of her last relatives and, with no other way to stay, paid for a sham marriage certificate bearing his name. He never met her; she spent her time in the country working in a laundry and writing him letters. Song Hae-sung's Korean melodrama, adapted from Jiro Asada's story 'Love Letter,' stars Choi Min-sik and Cecilia Cheung and moves between Kang-jae's present and Failan's time in Korea.
Failan (2001) is a film IMDb files under the drama and romance genres. It runs 1h 55m. It was made in South Korea. It plays in Korean.
Only 32 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 34 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 87 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 Failan 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 32.
Cohort: Films · 2000s
