Film · 1980 · Films · 1980s
Ordinary People
Scored from 280 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1980s (3,141 peers).
Summary
In affluent Lake Forest, Illinois, the Jarrett family is living around the boating accident that killed their elder son, Buck. Teenage Conrad has just come home from a psychiatric hospital after a suicide attempt, and returns to school and the swim team barely able to talk about any of it. His father Calvin keeps anxiously reaching for him, while his mother Beth retreats into routine and appearances and cannot forgive Conrad for surviving. Persuaded to see a psychiatrist, Dr. Berger, Conrad slowly begins to face his guilt as the marriage around him strains. Robert Redford's first film as director, a domestic drama adapted from Judith Guest's novel.
Ordinary People is a 1980 drama film. Its certificate is R. Its country of origin is listed as the United States. It runs 2h 4m.
The calibrated figure is built from 280 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 296 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. 3,140 other films from the 1980s form the cohort it is ranked inside. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 1,267 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 Ordinary People 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 · 1980s (3,141 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 280.
Cohort: Films · 1980s
