Film · 1946 · Films · 1940s
Shoeshine
Scored from 30 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1940s (16 peers).
Summary
Pasquale and Giuseppe are two boys shining shoes for American soldiers in the rubble of postwar Rome, saving for a white horse they have set their hearts on. Drawn by Giuseppe's older brother into a black-market swindle, they get the money and the horse, then are arrested and shut into an overcrowded juvenile prison. Inside, hunger, informers and the interrogators' manipulations turn the two friends against each other. Vittorio De Sica's film, written with Cesare Zavattini and acted largely by nonprofessionals on location, is an early work of Italian neorealism and received a special Academy Award for foreign film.
Shoeshine is a 1946 drama film. It plays in Italian. Its country of origin is listed as Italy. It runs 1h 33m.
15 other films from the 1940s form the cohort it is ranked inside. Only 30 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. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 59 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 Shoeshine 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 · 1940s (16 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 30.
Cohort: Films · 1940s
