Film · 1965 · Films · 1960s
The Flight of the Phoenix
Scored from 118 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1960s (1,929 peers).
Summary
A cargo plane carrying oil-field workers across the Sahara flies into a sandstorm and comes down far off its route, stranding pilot Frank Towns, his drink-sodden navigator Lew Moran and a dozen passengers with little water and no chance that searchers are looking in the right place. As heat and rationing wear the men down, a German passenger, aircraft designer Heinrich Dorfmann, proposes cutting up the wreck to build a smaller single-engine plane from its parts. Towns, who blames himself for the crash, resists both the scheme and Dorfmann's contempt as thirst and a plan to march for help split the survivors. Robert Aldrich's survival drama, from Elleston Trevor's novel, stars James Stewart and Hardy Krüger.
Released in 1965, The Flight of the Phoenix is an adventure and drama film. It is rated Approved. It was made in the United States.
The cohort it is ranked inside is 1960s films — 1,929 of them. 118 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 122 reviewers with at least two reviews each 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 Flight of the Phoenix 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 · 1960s (1,929 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 118.
Cohort: Films · 1960s
