Film · 2021 · Films · 2020s
Nightmare Alley
Scored from 838 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2020s (7,930 peers).
Summary
A drifter enters a traveling carnival and learns the arts of manipulation and con games. When he meets a psychologist, he sees an opportunity for an even bigger con targeting a wealthy industrialist.
Nightmare Alley is a 2021 drama, thriller and crime film starring Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara. Its certificate is R. Guillermo del Toro directed it. It runs 2h 30m. Its country of origin is listed as the United States.
The calibrated figure is built from 838 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 851 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 812 of whom clear the calibration test. 7,929 other films from the 2020s 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 Nightmare Alley 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 838.
Cohort: Films · 2020s
