Film · 2009 · Films · 2000s
The Cove
Scored from 99 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2000s (7,847 peers).
Summary
Ric O'Barry captured and trained the dolphins that played Flipper on television, then spent the following decades trying to dismantle the captive-dolphin industry he helped create. Here he leads a team of free divers, special-effects technicians and filmmakers to Taiji, a fishing town in Japan's Wakayama Prefecture, where boats herd migrating dolphins into a screened-off inlet each season, selling some to marine parks and killing the rest out of sight. Shadowed by police, guards and local officials, the crew rigs camouflaged cameras and hydrophones on the cliffs to record what happens inside the cove. Louie Psihoyos's documentary also takes up mercury contamination in dolphin meat and Japan's position at the International Whaling Commission.
Released in 2009, The Cove is a biography, crime and documentary film. Its country of origin is listed as the United States. Its certificate is PG-13. It runs 1h 32m.
The cohort it is ranked inside is 2000s films — 7,847 of them. Only 99 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 105 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 The Cove 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 · 2000s (7,847 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 99.
Cohort: Films · 2000s
