Film · 1990 · Films · 1990s
Awakenings
Scored from 237 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1990s (4,082 peers).
Summary
In 1969, Dr. Malcolm Sayer, a research physician whose previous subjects were earthworms, takes a post at a chronic-care hospital in the Bronx and finds a ward of patients locked in catatonia — survivors of the encephalitis lethargica epidemic that followed the First World War. He becomes convinced that they are awake inside their stillness, and talks the skeptical staff into trying the new Parkinson's drug L-Dopa on Leonard Lowe, mute and rigid since boyhood. Leonard surfaces into a middle-aged body, impatient for ordinary freedoms and drawn to Paula, a young woman visiting her father on the ward. Penny Marshall's drama, adapted from Oliver Sacks's memoir, stars Robin Williams and Robert De Niro.
Awakenings is a 1990 biography and drama film. It is rated PG-13. It was made in the United States. The runtime is 121 minutes.
237 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 247 reviewers with at least two reviews each feeds the raw-average track. The cohort it is ranked inside is 1990s films — 4,082 of them.
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 Awakenings 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 · 1990s (4,082 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 237.
Cohort: Films · 1990s
