Film · 2021 · Films · 2020s
Passing
Scored from 152 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2020s (7,930 peers).
Summary
In 1920s New York, Irene, a light-skinned Black woman living in Harlem, reconnects with childhood friend Clare, who has been passing as white and is married to a racist man unaware of her heritage. As Clare insinuates herself into Irene's family and social world, the renewed friendship stirs envy, desire, and mounting tension over identity and belonging.
Passing is a 2021 drama, mystery and thriller film.
Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 76 of whom clear the calibration test. The calibrated figure is built from 152 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 154 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 7,929 2020s films, not against the whole corpus.
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 Passing 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 152.
Cohort: Films · 2020s
