Film · 2015 · Films · 2010s
Spotlight
Scored from 663 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2010s (13,059 peers).
Summary
In 2001 the Boston Globe's Spotlight team — editor Walter 'Robby' Robinson with reporters Michael Rezendes, Sacha Pfeiffer and Matt Carroll — is pointed by incoming editor Marty Baron at a column about a priest accused of abusing children. Working survivors, a combative plaintiffs' lawyer and court records the Church has kept sealed, they find not one offender but a pattern, and evidence that the Archdiocese of Boston moved accused priests from parish to parish. The pressure is institutional as much as legal: the Church's weight in a Catholic city, the paper's own earlier incuriosity, and the temptation to publish one case rather than wait for the pattern. Tom McCarthy's procedural drama reconstructs the reporting behind the Globe's 2002 investigation.
Released in 2015, Spotlight is a biography, crime and drama film. Its certificate is R. Its country of origin is listed as the United States. It runs 2h 9m.
13,058 other films from the 2010s form the cohort it is ranked inside. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 2,505 of whom clear the calibration test. The calibrated figure is built from 663 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 682 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead.
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 Spotlight 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 663.
Cohort: Films · 2010s
