Film · 1990 · Films · 1990s
Mountains of the Moon
Scored from 44 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1990s (4,082 peers).
Summary
Bob Rafelson's historical adventure follows the Victorian explorers Richard Francis Burton, a soldier and linguist with a scandalous reputation, and John Hanning Speke, a younger, better-bred officer, who first travel together on a Royal Geographical Society venture into Somaliland that ends in a night raid at Berbera and leaves Burton speared through the face. They set out again in 1857 from Zanzibar to find the source of the Nile, and after months of fever, desertion and swamp they reach Lake Tanganyika, where an ailing Burton lets Speke march north alone to a vast lake he names Victoria. Speke cannot prove the claim, and back in London patrons, publishers and the Society itself press the two friends into a public quarrel over the discovery. Patrick Bergin and Iain Glen star.
Mountains of the Moon is a 1990 adventure, drama and history film. It was made in the United Kingdom. It runs 2h 15m. It is rated PG-13.
Only 44 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 45 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. A second review pool sits behind it as well: 42 Rotten Tomatoes reviewers clear the same calibration test, and Rankquant scores them separately.
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 Mountains of the Moon 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 44.
Cohort: Films · 1990s
