Film · 1973 · Films · 1970s
The Sting
Scored from 353 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1970s (2,406 peers).
Summary
George Roy Hill's Depression-era caper, written by David S. Ward, opens in 1936 Joliet, Illinois, where small-time grifter Johnny Hooker (Robert Redford) unknowingly robs a courier carrying numbers money for Doyle Lonnegan (Robert Shaw), an Irish-American racketeer who has Hooker's partner killed in reply. Hooker flees to Chicago and finds Henry Gondorff (Paul Newman), a big-con man lying low, and the pair recruit a crew to take Lonnegan for a fortune. Their scheme is 'the wire': a counterfeit off-track betting parlour and a story about race results delayed by telegraph. A crooked detective and a federal agent close in while the con is still being built.
The Sting (1973) is a film IMDb files under the comedy, crime and drama genres. It was made in the United States. The runtime is 129 minutes. It is rated PG.
353 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 365 reviewers with at least two reviews each feeds the raw-average track. 2,405 other films from the 1970s form the cohort it is ranked inside.
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 Sting 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 · 1970s (2,406 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 353.
Cohort: Films · 1970s
