Film · 1991 · Films · 1990s
Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse
Scored from 65 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1990s (4,082 peers).
Summary
A documentary on the ruinous making of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, built by Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper from 16mm behind-the-scenes footage and candid audio Eleanor Coppola recorded during the 1976 shoot in the Philippines. A production scheduled for six weeks ran well over a year: a typhoon destroyed the sets, Harvey Keitel was replaced by Martin Sheen, Sheen suffered a near-fatal heart attack, and Marlon Brando turned up overweight and barely acquainted with the material. On his wife's tapes Coppola, by then underwriting the overruns from his own money, admits he has no ending and expects humiliation. Interviews with Coppola, Sheen, Dennis Hopper and George Lucas frame the footage.
Released in 1991, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse is a documentary film. Its country of origin is listed as the United States. The runtime is 96 minutes. Its certificate is R.
Only 65 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 66 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track. 4,081 other films from the 1990s form the cohort it is ranked inside.
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 of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse 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 · 1990s (4,082 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 65.
Cohort: Films · 1990s
