Film · 2013 · Films · 2010s
Philomena
Scored from 232 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2010s (13,059 peers).
Summary
Martin Sixsmith, a British journalist freshly sacked as a Labour government adviser, reluctantly takes on a human-interest story: Philomena Lee, an Irish retiree, has kept secret for fifty years the son she bore as a teenager at the Roscrea convent, where the nuns arranged his adoption to America while she worked out her keep in the laundry. The pair set out together, from the Irish Midlands to Washington, D.C., chasing a paper trail the abbey insists burned in a fire. The search is complicated by the distance between his atheist indignation and her faith. Stephen Frears directed this British drama, with Judi Dench and Steve Coogan, from Sixsmith's book.
Released in 2013, Philomena is a biography, comedy and drama film. It is rated PG-13. The runtime is 98 minutes. It was made in the United Kingdom.
A second review pool sits behind it as well: 1,877 Rotten Tomatoes reviewers clear the same calibration test, and Rankquant scores them separately. Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 13,058 2010s films, not against the whole corpus. 232 IMDb reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, and those are the ones the calibrated score reads; a separate, broader pool of 233 reviewers with at least two reviews each feeds the raw-average track.
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 Philomena 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 · 2010s (13,059 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 232.
Cohort: Films · 2010s
