Film · 2003 · Films · 2000s
Song for a Raggy Boy
Scored from 30 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2000s (7,847 peers).
Summary
In 1939, William Franklin takes a teaching post at St. Jude's, a Catholic reformatory school on the Irish coast, arriving as its first lay teacher after fighting against Franco in Spain. The boys there are known by number rather than name and disciplined by the Brothers with beatings, most savagely by the young Brother John, whose authority Franklin undercuts by teaching poetry and treating the inmates as pupils. As war breaks out in Europe and the school's regime tightens, the standoff between the two men closes around the boys caught between them. Aisling Walsh's Irish drama is adapted from Patrick Galvin's memoir of his own confinement.
Song for a Raggy Boy (2003) is a film IMDb files under the drama and history genres. Its certificate is R. It runs 1h 34m. Its country of origin is listed as Ireland.
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 34 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track. Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 7,846 2000s films, not against the whole corpus. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 109 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 Song for a Raggy Boy 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 · 2000s (7,847 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 · 2000s
