Film · 2018 · Films · 2010s
Free Solo
Scored from 271 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2010s (13,059 peers).
Summary
Alex Honnold, a professional climber who lives out of a van, sets out to climb the roughly 3,000-foot granite face of El Capitan in Yosemite Valley without ropes or protective gear, a free solo of the route Freerider that no one had made. Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi follow close to two years of preparation: rehearsing the wall on a rope, memorising sequences through the Boulder Problem, and walking away from attempts when the conditions or his nerves are wrong. Off the wall, a new relationship with Sanni McCandless and an injury complicate the single-mindedness the climb demands, while the camera crew weighs whether its presence could break his concentration. A National Geographic documentary feature.
Free Solo is a 2018 adventure, documentary and sport film. It was made in the United States. It runs 1h 40m. It is rated PG-13.
A second review pool sits behind it as well: 268 Rotten Tomatoes reviewers clear the same calibration test, and Rankquant scores them separately. 271 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 285 reviewers with at least two reviews each feeds the raw-average track. 13,058 other films from the 2010s form the cohort it is ranked inside.
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 Free Solo 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 271.
Cohort: Films · 2010s
