Film · 1979 · Films · 1970s
The China Syndrome
Scored from 127 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1970s (2,406 peers).
Summary
A television reporter and her cameraman witness a near-catastrophic accident during a routine visit to a California nuclear power plant. When the utility tries to cover up the incident, a conscience-stricken shift supervisor risks his career and life to expose the safety violations that nearly caused a meltdown.
The China Syndrome (1979) is a film IMDb files under the drama and thriller genres.
127 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 130 reviewers with at least two reviews each feeds the raw-average track. The cohort it is ranked inside is 1970s films — 2,406 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 The China Syndrome 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 · 1970s (2,406 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 127.
Cohort: Films · 1970s
