Film · 2012 · Films · 2010s
Searching for Sugar Man
Scored from 156 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2010s (13,059 peers).
Summary
Two South African fans set out to uncover the fate of Rodriguez, an obscure American singer-songwriter from the early 1970s whose albums flopped at home but became a massive, anti-apartheid anthem-spawning phenomenon in South Africa. The documentary traces their detective work through rumors of his onstage death, eventually revealing the truth about the man behind the music and the life he led far from the stardom he never knew he had.
Searching for Sugar Man is a 2012 biography, documentary and music film. It runs 1h 26m. It was made in Sweden and the United Kingdom. It is rated PG-13.
156 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 175 reviewers with at least two reviews each feeds the raw-average track. A second review pool sits behind it as well: 916 Rotten Tomatoes reviewers clear the same calibration test, and Rankquant scores them separately. The cohort it is ranked inside is 2010s films — 13,059 of them.
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 Searching for Sugar Man 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 · 2010s (13,059 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 156.
Cohort: Films · 2010s
