Film · 2005 · Films · 2000s
A History of Violence
Scored from 865 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2000s (7,847 peers).
Summary
A quiet, small-town diner owner violently thwarts two armed robbers, attracting the attention of a mysterious man from his past. As his previously unknown history as a brutal enforcer catches up with him, his carefully constructed suburban life begins to unravel.
A History of Violence (2005) is a film IMDb files under the crime, drama and thriller genres. It is rated R. David Cronenberg directed it, with Viggo Mortensen, Ed Harris and William Hurt in the cast. It was made in the United States and Canada. The runtime is 96 minutes.
The cohort it is ranked inside is 2000s films — 7,847 of them. 865 IMDb reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, and those are the ones the calibrated score reads; a separate, broader pool of 894 reviewers with at least two reviews each 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 History of Violence 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 865.
Cohort: Films · 2000s
