Film · 1994 · Films · 1990s
Heavenly Creatures
Scored from 208 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1990s (4,082 peers).
Summary
In Christchurch, New Zealand, in the early 1950s, schoolgirl Pauline Rieper forms an immediate and consuming friendship with Juliet Hulme, the English daughter of a newly arrived college rector. Both girls have histories of childhood illness, and both retreat into an invented kingdom called Borovnia, which they populate with plasticine figures, novels and private saints, and which starts to colour how they see the adults around them. When the Hulme marriage breaks down and arrangements are made to send Juliet overseas, the prospect of separation becomes intolerable to them. Peter Jackson's film dramatises the Parker-Hulme case, drawing on Pauline's diaries, with Melanie Lynskey and Kate Winslet in their first screen roles.
Heavenly Creatures (1994) is a film IMDb files under the biography, crime and drama genres. Its certificate is R. It runs 1h 39m. Its country of origin is listed as New Zealand.
The calibrated figure is built from 208 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 219 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. 4,081 other films from the 1990s form the cohort it is ranked inside. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 1,752 of whom clear the calibration test.
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 Heavenly Creatures 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 208.
Cohort: Films · 1990s
