Film · 2020 · Films · 2020s
My Octopus Teacher
Scored from 449 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2020s (7,930 peers).
Summary
Burned out and unable to work, the South African filmmaker Craig Foster begins free-diving every day, without tank or wetsuit, in a cold kelp forest off the Cape Peninsula near Cape Town. He finds a common octopus in a den and, instead of filming her once and leaving, returns to the same stretch of reef almost daily for a year until she stops hiding from him. The film follows her hunting, her camouflage and shell armour, and her narrow escapes from pyjama sharks, while Foster narrates what the daily discipline restores in him. Directed by Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed, it is a nature documentary built largely from Foster's own underwater footage.
My Octopus Teacher is a 2020 documentary and nature film. It is rated G. It was directed by Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed. It stars Craig Foster. It was made in South Africa. The runtime is 85 minutes.
7,929 other films from the 2020s form the cohort it is ranked inside. 449 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 479 reviewers with at least two reviews each feeds the raw-average track. A second review pool sits behind it as well: 142 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 My Octopus Teacher 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 449.
Cohort: Films · 2020s
