Film · 2025 · Films · 2020s
The Ballad of Wallis Island
Scored from 105 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2020s (7,930 peers).
Summary
Charles Heath, a relentlessly chatty widower who has won the lottery twice, lives alone on a remote island off the Welsh coast and spends a slice of his fortune hiring his favourite musician for a private concert with an audience of one. That musician is Herb McGwyer, formerly half of the folk duo McGwyer Mortimer, who arrives soaked and irritable to find no venue, no phone signal, and — because Charles has quietly booked her as well — his estranged former partner Nell, now married and settled elsewhere. Cooped up with a fan who knows their catalogue better than they do, the two have to work out whether they can play together again. A British comedy-drama expanded by Tim Key and Tom Basden from their own short film.
The Ballad of Wallis Island is a 2025 comedy, drama and music film. It runs 1h 40m. Inside comedy it is classed as Dramedy. Its country of origin is listed as the United Kingdom. Its certificate is PG-13.
Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 7,929 2020s films, not against the whole corpus. The calibrated figure is built from 105 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 110 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 168 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 The Ballad of Wallis Island 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 · 2020s (7,930 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 105.
Cohort: Films · 2020s
