Film · 1974 · Films · 1970s
Hearts and Minds
Scored from 37 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1970s (2,406 peers).
Summary
Peter Davis's documentary sets the reasoning of the Americans who ran the war in Vietnam against the experience of the people it fell on. Interviews with Walt Rostow, Clark Clifford, General William Westmoreland, Daniel Ellsberg and a returned prisoner of war are cut against Vietnamese farmers, a coffin maker and a father grieving his children, and against scenes of a high-school football rally and a small-town parade back home. The method is juxtaposition: Westmoreland's claim that Asians place little value on life is placed directly beside the mourning it denies. Released as the war was ending, it treats the fighting as continuous with attitudes in America rather than a departure from them.
Released in 1974, Hearts and Minds is a documentary, history and war film. Its country of origin is listed as the United States. It runs 1h 51m and carries an R certificate.
2,405 other films from the 1970s form the cohort it is ranked inside. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 176 of whom clear the calibration test. Only 37 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 38 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 Hearts and Minds 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 37.
Cohort: Films · 1970s
