Film · 2011 · Films · 2010s
The Flowers of War
Scored from 132 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2010s (13,059 peers).
Summary
Zhang Yimou's Chinese war drama takes place in Nanjing in December 1937, as Japanese troops overrun the city. John Miller, an American mortician who has come to bury a priest, takes shelter in a Catholic cathedral and finds it already occupied by a group of convent schoolgirls and, soon after, by courtesans fleeing the nearby brothel district, led by Yu Mo. To keep the soldiers outside from breaking in, the hard-drinking Miller puts on the dead priest's cassock and passes himself off as clergy, while the two groups of women share the compound in mutual contempt. Adapted from Geling Yan's novel, it follows the uneasy bargain that forms as the danger closes in.
The Flowers of War is a 2011 drama, history and romance film. It is rated R. The runtime is 146 minutes. Its listed language is Mandarin. It was made in China.
132 IMDb reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, and those are the ones the calibrated score reads; a separate, broader pool of 136 reviewers with at least two reviews each feeds the raw-average track. The cohort it is ranked inside is 2010s films — 13,059 of them. A second review pool sits behind it as well: 459 Rotten Tomatoes reviewers clear the same calibration test, and Rankquant scores them separately.
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 Flowers of War 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 132.
Cohort: Films · 2010s
