Is RBG actually good?

RBG sits in the 88.7% percentile against all 52,376 ranked films, meaning it scores above 88.7% of them. That figure is a rank, not a star average: each reviewer's score is re-centred on their own rating history before anything is compared, so a generous grader and a harsh one count the same.

How does RBG compare to similar films?

Within Films · 2010s, RBG lands in the 92.0% percentile. The cohort comparison exists because a global rank flatters or punishes a film for its category rather than its quality.

How many reviewers is RBG's score based on?

55 reviewers cleared the calibration test for RBG — meaning their rating history varies enough to place a personal baseline. Reviewers who rate everything the same carry no information and are excluded rather than averaged in.

How is the RBG score calculated?

Every review is scored relative to the reviewer's own average rather than taken at face value, then each calibrated reviewer is weighted equally and the result is expressed as a percentile against the full corpus. The output is a rank among peers, which is why it is published as a percentile and never as a star rating.

2018

global pct

88.7

Film · 2018 · Films · 2010s

RBG

Name: RBG
Genre: Biography, Documentary
Released: 2018
Duration: 1 h 36 min

Scored from 55 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2010s (13,059 peers).

88.7%

Global percentile

vs. all 52,376 ranked titles

92.0%

In-cohort percentile

Films · 2010s · 13,059 titles

94.6%

AI-adjusted percentile

55 calibrated reviewers, thin samples pulled to the mean

Summary

Betsy West and Julie Cohen's documentary traces Ruth Bader Ginsburg's path from a Brooklyn girlhood, through Harvard and Columbia law schools, to the gender-discrimination cases she argued before the US Supreme Court for the ACLU in the 1970s, and finally to her own appointment to that bench in 1993. Archival footage and audio of her oral arguments are set alongside interviews with Ginsburg herself, her children, Gloria Steinem, Nina Totenberg and Bill Clinton. The film places her incremental, case-by-case legal strategy against the blunt dissents that made her, late in life, an unlikely popular figure known as the Notorious RBG. It also covers her marriage to Marty Ginsburg and her friendship with Antonin Scalia.

RBG (2018) is a film IMDb files under the biography and documentary genres. The runtime is 96 minutes. Its country of origin is listed as the United States. Its certificate is PG.

Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 13,058 2010s films, not against the whole corpus. Only 55 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 56 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 174 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 RBG 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 55.