Film · 2007 · Films · 2000s
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Scored from 192 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2000s (7,847 peers).
Summary
In December 1995 Jean-Dominique Bauby, editor of French Elle, suffers a massive stroke at forty-three and wakes in a hospital on the northern French coast with locked-in syndrome: his mind intact, his body paralysed, his left eye the only part of him he can still move. A speech therapist devises a system in which she recites the alphabet in order of letter frequency and he blinks at the letter he wants, and through it he begins dictating a book about his children, his father, the women in his life, and the memory and imagination he calls his butterfly. Julian Schnabel shoots much of this French-language biographical drama from inside Bauby's field of vision, adapting the memoir he composed that way, with Mathieu Amalric as Bauby.
Released in 2007, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a biography and drama film. Its certificate is PG-13. It was made in France. It plays in French. It runs 1h 52m.
7,846 other films from the 2000s form the cohort it is ranked inside. The calibrated figure is built from 192 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 195 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 6,657 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 Diving Bell and the Butterfly 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 192.
Cohort: Films · 2000s
