Film · 1983 · Films · 1980s
Tender Mercies
Scored from 85 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1980s (3,141 peers).
Summary
Mac Sledge, played by Robert Duvall, is a once-celebrated country songwriter whose career and marriage have dissolved into drinking, and who wakes up broke at a rundown motel and filling station on the flat Texas plains. Rosa Lee, the young widow who runs the place alone with her small son Sonny, offers him work on the condition that he stops drinking, and the arrangement slowly turns into a marriage. As Mac edges back toward writing songs, he also has to face his ex-wife, the still-touring star Dixie Scott, and the teenage daughter Dixie has kept away from him. A spare, plainspoken drama written by Horton Foote and directed by Bruce Beresford.
Released in 1983, Tender Mercies is a drama and music film. Its country of origin is listed as the United States. Its certificate is PG. It runs 1h 32m.
Only 85 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 87 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 200 of whom clear the calibration test. 3,140 other films from the 1980s form the cohort it is ranked inside.
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 Tender Mercies 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 85.
Cohort: Films · 1980s
