Film · 1988 · Films · 1980s
Mississippi Burning
Scored from 220 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1980s (3,141 peers).
Summary
In the summer of 1964, two FBI agents are sent to fictional Jessup County, Mississippi, to investigate the disappearance of three civil rights workers on a back road. Rupert Anderson, a former small-town Mississippi sheriff who prefers to work the locals over a beer, is paired with Alan Ward, a by-the-book Justice Department man who wants a federal show of force. The town's police and Klansmen stonewall the inquiry and answer with beatings and arson, while Anderson cultivates the wife of a deputy who may know what happened. Directed by Alan Parker, it is an American crime drama loosely based on the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner.
Mississippi Burning is a 1988 crime, drama and mystery film. The runtime is 128 minutes. It is rated R. It was made in the United States.
The cohort it is ranked inside is 1980s films — 3,141 of them. A second review pool sits behind it as well: 1,212 Rotten Tomatoes reviewers clear the same calibration test, and Rankquant scores them separately. 220 IMDb reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, and those are the ones the calibrated score reads; a separate, broader pool of 222 reviewers with at least two reviews each 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 Mississippi Burning 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 · 1980s (3,141 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 220.
Cohort: Films · 1980s
