Film · 2016 · Films · 2010s
Brain on Fire
Scored from 119 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2010s (13,059 peers).
Summary
A young New York Post reporter's life unravels as she begins experiencing seizures, psychosis, and erratic behavior that doctors initially dismiss as stress or a psychiatric breakdown. As her condition rapidly worsens and she is hospitalized, her family and a determined neurologist race to uncover the rare autoimmune disease attacking her brain. Based on Susannah Cahalan's memoir.
Released in 2016, Brain on Fire is a biography and drama film.
Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 54 of whom clear the calibration test. The calibrated figure is built from 119 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 129 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. The cohort it is ranked inside is 2010s films — 13,059 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 Brain on Fire 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 · 2010s (13,059 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 119.
Cohort: Films · 2010s
