Film · 1983 · Films · 1980s
Sadma
Scored from 29 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1980s (3,141 peers).
Summary
Balu Mahendra's Hindi remake of his own Tamil film Moondram Pirai stars Sridevi as Nehalata, a young woman from a wealthy family whose head injury in a road accident erases her memory and leaves her with the mind of a small child. Lost and unable to say who she is, she is sold into a brothel, where Somu (Kamal Haasan), a schoolteacher visiting the city, recognises her condition and gets her out. He hides her at his quarters in a hill station and looks after her while trying to trace her family, caring for a child in an adult woman's body. The romantic drama turns on the impossible position that arrangement creates for him. Ilaiyaraaja wrote the score.
Sadma (1983) is a film IMDb files under the drama and romance genres. The runtime is 167 minutes. Its listed language is Tamil. It was made in India.
A second review pool sits behind it as well: 30 Rotten Tomatoes reviewers clear the same calibration test, and Rankquant scores them separately. Only 29 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 30 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track. Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 3,140 1980s 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 Sadma 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 29.
Cohort: Films · 1980s
