Film · 2013 · Films · 2010s
Muscle Shoals
Scored from 29 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2010s (13,059 peers).
Summary
Greg Camalier's documentary asks how a small town on the Tennessee River in northwest Alabama produced a run of definitive soul and rock recordings. Its central figure is Rick Hall, who climbed out of rural poverty to build FAME Studios, and the white session players known as the Swampers, whose playing behind Percy Sledge, Aretha Franklin and Wilson Pickett led listeners to assume the band was Black. The film follows the studio as an integrated room in the segregated South, the rhythm section's split from Hall to open a rival studio down the road, and the artists who made the trip south, from the Rolling Stones to Duane Allman. It is told through interviews and archival session footage.
Muscle Shoals is a 2013 biography, documentary and history film. It runs 2h 23m. Its certificate is PG. Its country of origin is listed as the United States.
Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 92 of whom clear the calibration test. Only 29 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 31 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track. 13,058 other films from the 2010s form the cohort it is ranked inside.
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 Muscle Shoals 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 29.
Cohort: Films · 2010s
