Film · 1985 · Films · 1980s
Witness
Scored from 217 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1980s (3,141 peers).
Summary
After a young Amish boy witnesses a brutal murder in a Philadelphia train station, detective John Book uncovers a conspiracy that reaches into the police department. Wounded and hunted, Book takes refuge with the boy and his widowed mother in their Pennsylvania Amish community, where he must hide among the pacifist farmers while a quiet bond grows between two people from incompatible worlds.
Released in 1985, Witness is a crime, drama and romance film.
The calibrated figure is built from 217 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 226 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. 3,140 other films from the 1980s 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 Witness 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 217.
Cohort: Films · 1980s
