Film · 2009 · Films · 2000s
A Serious Man
Scored from 363 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2000s (7,847 peers).
Summary
In 1967 suburban Minnesota, Larry Gopnik, a Jewish physics professor, watches his stable life unravel: his wife asks for a divorce to marry a family friend, his tenure case is jeopardized by anonymous letters and a bribing student, and his troubled brother won't leave the couch. Desperate for meaning, Larry seeks counsel from a series of rabbis as misfortunes pile up, hoping to understand why a serious man is being tested.
Released in 2009, A Serious Man is a comedy and drama film. Inside comedy it is classed as Dark Comedy.
Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 7,846 2000s films, not against the whole corpus. The calibrated figure is built from 363 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 375 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 4,579 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 A Serious Man 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 363.
Cohort: Films · 2000s
