Film · 2021 · Films · 2020s
Mandela
Scored from 94 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2020s (7,930 peers).
Summary
In the Tamil village of Soorangudi, a barber with no fixed name — the villagers call him whatever insult comes to mind — cuts hair for two rival caste factions that agree on nothing except that he is beneath both. Opening a bank account forces him to register a name, so he takes Nelson Mandela, which also gets him a voter ID. When the panchayat election between the chief's two sons, half-brothers backed by the opposing castes, comes down to a dead heat, his single vote is the only one left uncast, and both camps set about courting and bribing him. Madonne Ashwin's satire stars Yogi Babu in the title role.
Released in 2021, Mandela is a comedy and drama film. Its listed language is Tamil. It was made in India.
Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 7,929 2020s films, not against the whole corpus. A second review pool sits behind it as well: 15 Rotten Tomatoes reviewers clear the same calibration test, and Rankquant scores them separately. Only 94 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 107 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track.
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 Mandela 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 94.
Cohort: Films · 2020s
