Film · 2018 · Films · 2010s
A Futile and Stupid Gesture
Scored from 61 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2010s (13,059 peers).
Summary
A biographical comedy about the founding and growth of National Lampoon magazine, following the lives and creative struggles of its founders and editors during the 1970s.
A Futile and Stupid Gesture is a 2018 biography and comedy film. It runs 1h 42m. Its country of origin is listed as the United States.
Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 74 of whom clear the calibration test. Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 13,058 2010s films, not against the whole corpus. Only 61 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 63 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track.
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 A Futile and Stupid Gesture 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 61.
Cohort: Films · 2010s
