Film · 1981 · Films · 1980s
Absence of Malice
Scored from 103 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1980s (3,141 peers).
Summary
A newspaper reporter publishes a story based on leaked classified information implicating a man in a murder, but the accusations are false and destroy his life.
Released in 1981, Absence of Malice is a drama, romance and thriller film. Its country of origin is listed as the United States. It runs 1h 56m and carries a PG certificate.
Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 3,140 1980s films, not against the whole corpus. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 165 of whom clear the calibration test. The calibrated figure is built from 103 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 103 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead.
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 Absence of Malice 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 103.
Cohort: Films · 1980s
