Film · 2019 · Films · 2010s
The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
Scored from 143 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2010s (13,059 peers).
Summary
In drought-stricken Malawi, a resourceful teenager named William Kamkwamba is forced to drop out of school when his family can no longer afford the fees. Determined to save his village from famine, he sneaks into the library and teaches himself engineering, scavenging parts to build a wind-powered turbine that can pump water for crops. Based on the true story of Kamkwamba's memoir.
The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind is a 2019 biography, drama and history film.
The calibrated figure is built from 143 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 157 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 66 of whom clear the calibration test. Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 13,058 2010s films, not against the whole corpus.
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 Boy Who Harnessed the Wind 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 143.
Cohort: Films · 2010s
