Film · 1999 · Films · 1990s
Magnolia
Scored from 961 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1990s (4,082 peers).
Summary
A sprawling ensemble drama set in Los Angeles that weaves together the stories of a dying television host, his estranged son, a troubled game show host, a cocaine-addicted woman, and other interconnected characters searching for meaning and connection. The film explores themes of regret, chance, and redemption as these disparate lives intersect.
Magnolia is a 1999 drama and crime film starring Tom Cruise, Jason Robards and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Its certificate is R. It runs 3h 8m. Paul Thomas Anderson directed it. Its country of origin is listed as the United States.
Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 9,065 of whom clear the calibration test. The cohort it is ranked inside is 1990s films — 4,082 of them. The calibrated figure is built from 961 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 1,016 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead.
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 Magnolia 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 961.
Cohort: Films · 1990s
