Film · 1996 · Films · 1990s
Phenomenon
Scored from 120 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1990s (4,082 peers).
Summary
An amiable small-town mechanic named George Malley is briefly knocked unconscious by a mysterious flash of light on his birthday and wakes up with rapidly expanding intelligence and telekinetic abilities. As his gifts grow, he tries to put them to use for his community and pursue a wary single mother, even as neighbors turn fearful and authorities take an unsettling interest in the cause of his transformation.
Released in 1996, Phenomenon is a drama, fantasy and romance film.
The calibrated figure is built from 120 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 125 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. 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 Phenomenon 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 120.
Cohort: Films · 1990s
