Film · 2009 · Films · 2000s
Mary and Max
Scored from 226 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2000s (7,847 peers).
Summary
Mary Daisy Dinkle is a lonely, birthmarked eight-year-old in the Melbourne suburb of Mount Waverley who picks a name at random from a New York telephone directory and posts a letter asking where American babies come from. The reply comes from Max Jerry Horowitz, a 44-year-old obese Jewish New Yorker with Asperger's syndrome, an anxiety disorder, and a fondness for chocolate hot dogs. Their correspondence runs for twenty years across two continents, surviving Mary's sherry-drinking mother, Max's spells of institutionalisation, and a betrayal of confidence that nearly ends the friendship. Adam Elliot's stop-motion claymation feature is narrated throughout as a bleakly comic adult fable.
Mary and Max is a 2009 animation, comedy and drama film. The runtime is 92 minutes. Its comedy subtype is Dramedy. It was made in Australia.
226 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 239 reviewers with at least two reviews each feeds the raw-average track. The cohort it is ranked inside is 2000s films — 7,847 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 Mary and Max 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 · 2000s (7,847 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 226.
Cohort: Films · 2000s
