Film · 2020 · Films · 2020s
The Phenomenon
Scored from 58 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2020s (7,930 peers).
Summary
James Fox's documentary compiles roughly seventy years of eyewitness testimony, declassified records and official statements about unidentified flying objects. Narrated by Peter Coyote, it works through Project Blue Book, the 1967 shutdown of nuclear missiles at Malmstrom Air Force Base, the 1976 Tehran encounter, the 1994 Ariel School sighting near Ruwa, Zimbabwe, where dozens of schoolchildren reported a landed craft, and the 2004 'Tic Tac' videos recorded by the USS Nimitz carrier group. On-camera subjects include computer scientist and ufologist Jacques Vallee, former Senate majority leader Harry Reid, ex-Pentagon officials Christopher Mellon and Luis Elizondo, and Stanford immunologist Garry Nolan.
Released in 2020, The Phenomenon is a documentary film. It was made in the United States.
Only 58 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 61 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track. The cohort it is ranked inside is 2020s films — 7,930 of them. A second review pool sits behind it as well: 24 Rotten Tomatoes reviewers clear the same calibration test, and Rankquant scores them separately.
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 Phenomenon 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 · 2020s (7,930 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 58.
Cohort: Films · 2020s
