Film · 2020 · Films · 2020s
Joe Bell
Scored from 132 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2020s (7,930 peers).
Summary
Based on a true story, a working-class Oregon father sets out on a cross-country walk to speak to schools about the dangers of bullying after his teenage son, who was bullied for being gay, takes his own life. Along the way, Joe wrestles with his own role as a father and the guilt of not having done enough.
Released in 2020, Joe Bell is a biography and drama film.
Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 89 of whom clear the calibration test. The calibrated figure is built from 132 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 138 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. The cohort it is ranked inside is 2020s films — 7,930 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 Joe Bell 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 132.
Cohort: Films · 2020s
