Film · 1974 · Films · 1970s
The Conversation
Scored from 403 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1970s (2,406 peers).
Summary
Harry Caul, a reclusive and paranoid San Francisco surveillance expert, is hired to record a conversation between a young couple in a crowded public square. As he obsessively pieces together the audio, he becomes convinced the recording will be used to harm them, and his guilt over a past job pushes him into a moral crisis that unravels his carefully guarded private life.
The Conversation (1974) is a film IMDb files under the drama, mystery and thriller genres.
2,405 other films from the 1970s form the cohort it is ranked inside. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 1,920 of whom clear the calibration test. The calibrated figure is built from 403 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 411 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead.
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 Conversation 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 403.
Cohort: Films · 1970s
