Film · 1976 · Films · 1970s
Harlan County U.S.A.
Scored from 47 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1970s (2,406 peers).
Summary
Barbara Kopple's documentary follows 180 coal miners and their families in Harlan County, Kentucky, who struck against the Eastover Mining Company, a Duke Power subsidiary, after voting in 1973 to join the United Mine Workers and being refused a contract. Kopple's crew stayed on the picket lines through the thirteen months of the strike, filming pre-dawn confrontations with scab convoys and company gunmen, and the women of the coal camps forming their own picket committee. Running alongside it is the union's internal crisis: the murder of reform candidate Jock Yablonski, the fall of president Tony Boyle, and the Miners for Democracy insurgency. The film also records black lung, unplumbed company housing, and the wage and safety terms in dispute.
Harlan County U.S.A. (1976) is a film IMDb files under the documentary genre. Its country of origin is listed as the United States. The runtime is 103 minutes. Its certificate is PG.
Only 47 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 48 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track. The cohort it is ranked inside is 1970s films — 2,406 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 Harlan County U.S.A. 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 47.
Cohort: Films · 1970s
