Film · 1997 · Films · 1990s
Children of Heaven
Scored from 149 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1990s (4,082 peers).
Summary
Ali, a schoolboy in a poor quarter of south Tehran, loses his younger sister Zahra's newly repaired pink shoes on the way home from the cobbler. Certain their father cannot afford a replacement and afraid of his temper, the siblings keep the loss secret and share Ali's worn sneakers: Zahra wears them to her morning classes, then races home at noon to hand them over for Ali's afternoon shift at school. The relay leaves him perpetually late and in trouble with his headmaster. When Ali hears that a citywide schoolboys' race awards a pair of sneakers for third place, he sets out to finish exactly third. Majid Majidi's Iranian drama keeps to the children's eye level throughout.
Released in 1997, Children of Heaven is a drama, family and sport film. It is rated PG. Its country of origin is listed as Iran. The runtime is 89 minutes. Its listed language is Persian.
149 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 169 reviewers with at least two reviews each feeds the raw-average track. A second review pool sits behind it as well: 796 Rotten Tomatoes reviewers clear the same calibration test, and Rankquant scores them separately. Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 4,081 1990s films, not against the whole corpus.
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 Children of Heaven 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 149.
Cohort: Films · 1990s
