Film · 2003 · Films · 2000s
The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill
Scored from 32 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2000s (7,847 peers).
Summary
Mark Bittner, an unemployed street musician living rent-free in a cottage on San Francisco's Telegraph Hill, spends his days feeding and observing a flock of feral cherry-headed conures that has settled in the neighborhood. Over several years he learns to tell the birds apart, names them — Connor, Mingus, Picasso, Sophie — and follows their courtships, illnesses and squabbles, while neighbors debate whether wild parrots should be fed at all. When the cottage's owners plan to renovate, Bittner faces eviction and the question of what becomes of the flock. Judy Irving's documentary is narrated by Bittner and shot on the hill's stairways and gardens.
Released in 2003, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill is a documentary film. Its certificate is G. Its country of origin is listed as the United States. It runs 1h 20m.
Only 32 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 33 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track. 7,846 other films from the 2000s 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 Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill 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 · 2000s (7,847 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 32.
Cohort: Films · 2000s
