Film · 1988 · Films · 1980s
The Thin Blue Line
Scored from 63 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1980s (3,141 peers).
Summary
Errol Morris's documentary reinvestigates the November 1976 killing of Dallas police officer Robert Wood, shot after he stopped a car driving at night without its headlights. Randall Dale Adams, a 28-year-old drifter working in Texas, was convicted and sentenced to death largely on the word of David Harris, the sixteen-year-old runaway whose stolen car it was and who had spent that day with him. Morris interviews Adams, Harris, detectives, prosecutors and the witnesses who placed Adams at the scene, intercutting stylised reenactments that shift with each contradictory account, over a Philip Glass score. It is less a chronicle of the crime than an account of how the conviction was built.
Released in 1988, The Thin Blue Line is a crime and documentary film. It was made in the United States. The runtime is 96 minutes.
Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 3,140 1980s films, not against the whole corpus. Only 63 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 66 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track.
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 Thin Blue Line 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 63.
Cohort: Films · 1980s
