Film · 2020 · Films · 2020s
Nomadland
Scored from 993 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2020s (7,930 peers).
Summary
After losing her home and job during the economic recession, Fern embarks on a journey across America as a modern nomad, living in a van. She travels throughout the country, meeting other van dwellers and experiencing their stories while navigating a new lifestyle in search of purpose.
Nomadland is a 2020 drama and adventure film directed by Chloé Zhao. Frances McDormand, David Strathairn and Linda May head the billed cast. It runs 1h 47m. Its country of origin is listed as the United States.
The cohort it is ranked inside is 2020s films — 7,930 of them. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 609 of whom clear the calibration test. The calibrated figure is built from 993 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 1,025 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 Nomadland 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 993.
Cohort: Films · 2020s
