Film · 1996 · Films · 1990s
Microcosmos
Scored from 34 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1990s (4,082 peers).
Summary
Over a single day and night in a meadow in southern France, Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou's documentary films insects, snails and spiders in extreme macro, using purpose-built lenses and motorised rigs that track creatures a few millimetres long. There is almost no narration: a dung beetle laboriously rolls its ball only to snag it on a thorn, two snails court in slow spirals, a mosquito emerges from its pupal case, and ants defend an aphid colony from ladybirds. A summer downpour arrives as a catastrophe, single raindrops detonating on stems and flooding nests. Bruno Coulais's score and amplified sound design carry the storytelling, treating a few square metres of grass as an entire landscape.
Microcosmos is a 1996 documentary film. It runs 1h 17m and carries a G certificate. It was made in France, in French.
A second review pool sits behind it as well: 206 Rotten Tomatoes reviewers clear the same calibration test, and Rankquant scores them separately. Only 34 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 34 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 Microcosmos 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 34.
Cohort: Films · 1990s
