Film · 2018 · Films · 2010s
The Spy Gone North
Scored from 28 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2010s (13,059 peers).
Summary
In the mid-1990s a former South Korean army major, Park Suk-young, is recruited by the ANSP, given the code name Black Venus and sent north under cover as a Seoul businessman chasing advertising and trade deals. His assignment is to get close enough to Pyongyang's leadership to verify the state of the North's nuclear weapons program, which means years of cultivating Ri Myung-un, the official who controls the regime's foreign-currency dealings, and angling for an audience with Kim Jong-il. As the 1997 presidential election nears, Park comes to suspect that his own side's dealings with the North have less to do with intelligence than with domestic politics. Yoon Jong-bin's dialogue-driven espionage drama is based on a real agent's operation.
The Spy Gone North (2018) is a film IMDb files under the drama and thriller genres. It is rated 12. The runtime is 137 minutes. It was made in South Korea, in Korean.
Only 28 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 28 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track. 13,058 other films from the 2010s form the cohort it is ranked inside. A second review pool sits behind it as well: 14 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 Spy Gone North 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 · 2010s (13,059 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 28.
Cohort: Films · 2010s
