Film · 2003 · Films · 2000s
The Fog of War
Scored from 111 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2000s (7,847 peers).
Summary
Errol Morris's documentary, subtitled Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, is built around an extended interview with McNamara at eighty-five, shot with Morris's Interrotron so that he appears to address the viewer directly. Organised into eleven numbered lessons, it moves through his statistical work on the American firebombing of Japan under Curtis LeMay, his brief presidency of the Ford Motor Company, and his years as Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson, taking in the Cuban Missile Crisis and the escalation of the Vietnam War. Archival footage, declassified White House tape recordings and a Philip Glass score accompany an account of decisions McNamara variously defends, revisits and declines to resolve. It won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
Released in 2003, The Fog of War is a biography, documentary and history film. It runs 1h 47m. Its country of origin is listed as the United States. Its certificate is PG.
The cohort it is ranked inside is 2000s films — 7,847 of them. The calibrated figure is built from 111 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 114 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 Fog of War 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 111.
Cohort: Films · 2000s
