Film · 2021 · Films · 2020s
Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)
Scored from 85 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2020s (7,930 peers).
Summary
Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson's documentary is built from footage of the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, a free concert series held over six Sundays in Mount Morris Park before crowds totaling around 300,000. The tapes were shot at the time but found no buyer and sat unseen for some fifty years; the film restores performances by Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, Sly and the Family Stone, B.B. King, Gladys Knight and the Pips, the 5th Dimension, and Mahalia Jackson with Mavis Staples. Between numbers, surviving performers and people who were in the audience watch the footage and recall that summer, which ran alongside the Apollo 11 landing and the turn toward Black Power.
Released in 2021, Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) is a documentary, history and music film. It was made in the United States. It is rated PG. The runtime is 117 minutes.
7,929 other films from the 2020s form the cohort it is ranked inside. Only 85 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 92 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track.
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 Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) 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 85.
Cohort: Films · 2020s
