Film · 1994 · Films · 1990s
Hoop Dreams
Scored from 71 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1990s (4,082 peers).
Summary
Steve James's documentary follows William Gates and Arthur Agee, two fourteen-year-old basketball players from Chicago's West Side, from the day recruiters bring them to St. Joseph High School — a suburban Catholic school with a storied program — through the next five years. Both commute ninety minutes each way to a school their families can barely afford, and their paths diverge as coaching decisions, tuition bills, grades, and injuries intervene. The camera spends as much time in their households as in gyms, tracking parents, siblings, and money. Shot over hundreds of hours, the footage was cut into a nearly three-hour theatrical feature.
Released in 1994, Hoop Dreams is a documentary, drama and sport film. Its certificate is PG-13. It runs 2h 54m. Its country of origin is listed as the United States.
Only 71 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 73 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track. The cohort it is ranked inside is 1990s films — 4,082 of them. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 785 of whom clear the calibration test.
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 Hoop Dreams 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 71.
Cohort: Films · 1990s
