Is Tower actually good?

Tower sits in the 99.7% percentile against all 52,376 ranked films, meaning it scores above 99.7% of them. That figure is a rank, not a star average: each reviewer's score is re-centred on their own rating history before anything is compared, so a generous grader and a harsh one count the same.

How does Tower compare to similar films?

Within Films · 2010s, Tower lands in the 99.8% percentile. The cohort comparison exists because a global rank flatters or punishes a film for its category rather than its quality.

How many reviewers is Tower's score based on?

33 reviewers cleared the calibration test for Tower — meaning their rating history varies enough to place a personal baseline. Reviewers who rate everything the same carry no information and are excluded rather than averaged in.

How is the Tower score calculated?

Every review is scored relative to the reviewer's own average rather than taken at face value, then each calibrated reviewer is weighted equally and the result is expressed as a percentile against the full corpus. The output is a rank among peers, which is why it is published as a percentile and never as a star rating.

2016

global pct

99.7

Film · 2016 · Films · 2010s

Tower

Name: Tower
Genre: Animation, Crime, Documentary
Released: 2016
Duration: 1 h 22 min

Scored from 33 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2010s (13,059 peers).

99.7%

Global percentile

vs. all 52,376 ranked titles

99.8%

In-cohort percentile

Films · 2010s · 13,059 titles

98.4%

AI-adjusted percentile

33 calibrated reviewers, thin samples pulled to the mean

Summary

On 1 August 1966 a sniper on the observation deck of the University of Texas clock tower opened fire on the campus below, pinning students and passers-by in the open for roughly ninety minutes. Keith Maitland's documentary reconstructs that hour and a half from the vantage of the people caught in it: a pregnant student, Claire Wilson, left lying wounded on the pavement, an injured newspaper delivery boy, a radio reporter broadcasting live, and the officers who eventually climbed the tower. Actors perform the participants' recorded testimony in rotoscoped animation, cut together with archival news footage and present-day interviews with the survivors themselves. The gunman is kept at the margins; the film stays on the ground.

Released in 2016, Tower is an animation, crime and documentary film. Its certificate is Not Rated. Its country of origin is listed as the United States. It runs 1h 22m.

Only 33 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. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 52 of whom clear the calibration test. 13,058 other films from the 2010s 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 Tower 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 33.