Film · 1964 · Films · 1960s
Zulu
Scored from 224 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1960s (1,929 peers).
Summary
In January 1879, hours after the British column at Isandlwana is annihilated, roughly 150 soldiers of the 24th Regiment of Foot learn that a Zulu impi some four thousand strong is advancing on their mission-station supply depot at Rorke's Drift in Natal. Lieutenant John Chard, a Royal Engineer sent to build a bridge at the ford, outranks Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead by seniority of commission, and the two must settle who commands as they barricade the hospital and storehouse with mealie bags and biscuit boxes. Cy Endfield's widescreen war film, narrated by Richard Burton and scored by John Barry, stages the siege at close to real time and gave Michael Caine his first major role.
Zulu (1964) is a film IMDb files under the drama, history and war genres. Its country of origin is listed as the United Kingdom. It runs 2h 18m.
1,928 other films from the 1960s form the cohort it is ranked inside. The calibrated figure is built from 224 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 235 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 1,143 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 Zulu 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 · 1960s (1,929 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 224.
Cohort: Films · 1960s
