Film · 2020 · Films · 2020s
Ma Rainey's Black Bottom
Scored from 362 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2020s (7,930 peers).
Summary
During a sweltering 1927 recording session in Chicago, legendary blues singer Ma Rainey clashes with her white producers over control of her music, while her ambitious trumpeter Levee pushes the band to play his modernized arrangements and chases dreams of starting his own group. As tensions mount in the cramped rehearsal room, old wounds and racial injustices boil over toward a tragic end.
Released in 2020, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom is a drama and music film.
362 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 377 reviewers with at least two reviews each feeds the raw-average track. Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 7,929 2020s 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 Ma Rainey's Black Bottom 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 362.
Cohort: Films · 2020s
