Film · 2012 · Films · 2010s
The Sessions
Scored from 135 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2010s (13,059 peers).
Summary
Based on the true story of poet and journalist Mark O'Brien, who has spent most of his life in an iron lung due to childhood polio. At 38, he decides he wants to lose his virginity and, with the guidance of his priest, hires a professional sex surrogate to help him explore intimacy and his own body.
The Sessions (2012) is a film IMDb files under the biography, comedy and drama genres.
The calibrated figure is built from 135 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 138 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 1,160 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 Sessions 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 135.
Cohort: Films · 2010s
