Film · 2023 · Films · 2020s
American Fiction
Scored from 335 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2020s (7,930 peers).
Summary
A frustrated Black novelist and academic, fed up with the publishing industry's appetite for stereotypical 'Black' stories, writes an outrageous pulp novel under a pseudonym as a joke. To his horror, the book is embraced as an authentic masterpiece, forcing him to maintain the deception while juggling family crises involving his aging mother and estranged siblings.
Released in 2023, American Fiction is a comedy and drama film. Inside comedy it is classed as Satire.
The calibrated figure is built from 335 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 363 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 7,929 2020s films, not against the whole corpus. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 453 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 American Fiction 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 · 2020s (7,930 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 335.
Cohort: Films · 2020s
