Film · 2022 · Films · 2020s
Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game
Scored from 27 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2020s (7,930 peers).
Summary
Austin and Meredith Bragg's biographical comedy-drama follows Roger Sharpe (Mike Faist), a young magazine writer who arrives in New York in the early 1970s and becomes the country's leading authority on pinball at a time when the machines have been banned in the city for three decades as a form of gambling. His expertise and the book he writes bring him to the attention of the pinball industry, which enlists him to demonstrate before the City Council that the game is one of skill rather than chance. Running alongside the campaign is his hesitant courtship of Ellen, a single mother unsure what to make of his fixation. The present-day Sharpe (Dennis Boutsikaris) narrates, repeatedly interrupting the filmmakers to dispute how his life is being dramatised.
Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game is a 2022 biography, comedy and drama film. The runtime is 91 minutes. It was made in the United States.
Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 7,929 2020s films, not against the whole corpus. A second review pool sits behind it as well: 23 Rotten Tomatoes reviewers clear the same calibration test, and Rankquant scores them separately. Only 27 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 28 reviewers with at least two reviews 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 Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game 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 27.
Cohort: Films · 2020s
