Film · 1984 · Films · 1980s
The Times of Harvey Milk
Scored from 29 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1980s (3,141 peers).
Summary
Rob Epstein's documentary, narrated by Harvey Fierstein, recounts the public life of Harvey Milk, the Castro Street camera-shop owner elected to San Francisco's Board of Supervisors in 1977 as one of the first openly gay officials in the United States. Built from television news footage and interviews with the people around him, among them campaign workers, neighbors, a union organizer and fellow supervisors, it follows the coalition he assembled in a changing city and his fight against the Briggs Initiative. Also present is fellow supervisor Dan White, whose resignation and its aftermath in November 1978 ended the lives of Milk and Mayor George Moscone. The last stretch turns to the city's reaction and the trial that followed.
The Times of Harvey Milk (1984) is a film IMDb files under the biography, documentary and history genres. Its country of origin is listed as the United States. It runs 1h 27m.
Only 29 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 31 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track. 3,140 other films from the 1980s form the cohort it is ranked inside. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 269 of whom clear the calibration test.
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 Times of Harvey Milk 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 29.
Cohort: Films · 1980s
