Film · 2009 · Films · 2000s
The Invention of Lying
Scored from 355 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2000s (7,847 peers).
Summary
In a world where no one has ever told a lie, a down-on-his-luck loser becomes the first person capable of saying things that aren't true. He quickly uses his new ability to gain wealth and influence, but struggles to win the heart of the woman he loves and grapples with the consequences when he invents a comforting falsehood about the afterlife.
The Invention of Lying (2009) is a film IMDb files under the comedy, fantasy and romance genres. Its comedy subtype is Romcom.
355 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 365 reviewers with at least two reviews each feeds the raw-average track. 7,846 other films from the 2000s 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 The Invention of Lying 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 355.
Cohort: Films · 2000s
