Film · 2022 · Films · 2020s
Empire of Light
Scored from 153 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2020s (7,930 peers).
Summary
In an English coastal town in the early 1980s, Hilary, a lonely cinema duty manager struggling with mental illness, forms an unexpected bond with Stephen, a young Black colleague facing the era's racism. Their relationship unfolds against the backdrop of a faded seaside movie palace, exploring connection, prejudice, and the healing power of cinema.
Empire of Light (2022) is a film IMDb files under the drama and romance genres.
A second review pool sits behind it as well: 122 Rotten Tomatoes reviewers clear the same calibration test, and Rankquant scores them separately. The cohort it is ranked inside is 2020s films — 7,930 of them. 153 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 156 reviewers with at least two reviews each feeds the raw-average track.
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 Empire of Light 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 153.
Cohort: Films · 2020s
