Film · 1999 · Films · 1990s
New Waterford Girl
Scored from 27 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1990s (4,082 peers).
Summary
A Canadian coming-of-age comedy-drama set in New Waterford, a coal-mining town on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. Fifteen-year-old Mooney Pottie (Liane Balaban) is a sardonic, artistically gifted misfit in a crowded Catholic household, desperate to get to art school in New York and unable to make anyone take the ambition seriously. When Lou (Tara Spencer-Nairn), a tough girl from the Bronx, moves in next door, Mooney gains both an ally and an idea: the only girls who ever leave town are the ones sent away in disgrace, so she decides to fake a pregnancy. Sustaining the fiction means managing her parents, the neighbours, the parish and a sympathetic new teacher.
New Waterford Girl is a 1999 comedy film. It runs 1h 37m. Its country of origin is listed as Canada.
Only 27 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 29 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track. 4,081 other films from the 1990s form the cohort it is ranked inside. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 100 of whom clear the calibration test.
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 New Waterford Girl 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 27.
Cohort: Films · 1990s
