Film · 2014 · Films · 2010s
Life Itself
Scored from 81 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2010s (13,059 peers).
Summary
Steve James's documentary follows Roger Ebert, the Chicago Sun-Times reviewer who became the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize, through the final months of his life. The camera sits with Ebert in hospital rooms during rehabilitation, where he answers questions by typing into a laptop voice after cancer surgery removed his lower jaw. Archival tape, interviews and passages from Ebert's memoir trace his newspaper apprenticeship, his drinking and recovery, his marriage to Chaz, and the combative on-air partnership with Gene Siskel that put criticism on television. Filmmakers including Martin Scorsese and Errol Morris describe what his attention meant to their careers.
Released in 2014, Life Itself is a biography and documentary film. It runs 2h 4m and carries a PG-13 certificate. It was made in the United States.
Only 81 of its IMDb reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, so the calibrated figure rests on a thin sample; a broader pool of 81 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track. Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 13,058 2010s 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 Life Itself 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 81.
Cohort: Films · 2010s
