Film · 2021 · Films · 2020s
Life of Crime 1984-2020
Scored from 33 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2020s (7,930 peers).
Summary
Jon Alpert's documentary compiles thirty-six years of filming three people from Newark, New Jersey: Rob Steffey, Freddie Rodriguez and Deliris Vasquez. Alpert first met them in the mid-1980s, when all three were young, using heroin and financing it by stealing, and he kept returning with a camera through arrests, prison terms, treatment, children and relapses. The film carries their lives forward across the decades, letting the same faces register what addiction and incarceration accumulate over a lifetime. It gathers and extends his earlier films One Year in a Life of Crime and Life of Crime 2 into a single long-form record.
Life of Crime 1984-2020 (2021) is a film IMDb files under the biography, crime and documentary genres. Its country of origin is listed as the United States.
7,929 other films from the 2020s form the cohort it is ranked inside. Only 33 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 35 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 Life of Crime 1984-2020 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 · 2020s (7,930 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 33.
Cohort: Films · 2020s
