Film · 1984 · Films · 1980s
The Killing Fields
Scored from 164 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1980s (3,141 peers).
Summary
Sydney Schanberg is a New York Times correspondent covering the war spilling out of Vietnam into Cambodia in the early 1970s, dependent on Dith Pran, the Cambodian journalist and interpreter who gets him to stories no foreigner could reach. When the Khmer Rouge enter Phnom Penh in April 1975, the Western press is evacuated, but Pran cannot be got out and is swallowed by the regime's emptied cities and forced-labour communes. The film then follows the two men apart, Pran surviving Year Zero and Schanberg in New York collecting prizes he cannot enjoy and refusing to stop looking. Roland Joffe directed, casting Haing S. Ngor, himself a survivor of the camps, as Pran.
Released in 1984, The Killing Fields is a biography, drama and history film. Its certificate is R. It runs 2h 21m. Its country of origin is listed as the United Kingdom.
The calibrated figure is built from 164 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 172 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 3,140 1980s films, not against the whole corpus.
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 Killing Fields 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 · 1980s (3,141 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 164.
Cohort: Films · 1980s
