Film · 1979 · Films · 1970s
Norma Rae
Scored from 57 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1970s (2,406 peers).
Summary
Norma Rae Webster works the floor of the cotton mill that employs most of her small Alabama town, where the machine noise is deafening and her mother's hearing is already failing. A union organiser named Reuben arrives from New York to sign up the workforce for the textile workers' union, and Norma Rae — a widow with two children and a shaky local reputation — becomes his most effective recruit. Organising costs her friendships, puts management on her back, and strains her new marriage to Sonny, a fellow millhand who did not expect a wife who spends her evenings at meetings. Martin Ritt directed; Sally Field won the Academy Award for Best Actress for the role.
Norma Rae is a 1979 drama film. Its country of origin is listed as the United States. The runtime is 110 minutes. Its certificate is PG.
The cohort it is ranked inside is 1970s films — 2,406 of them. Only 57 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 59 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 211 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 Norma Rae 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 · 1970s (2,406 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 57.
Cohort: Films · 1970s
