Film · 2001 · Films · 2000s
The Shipping News
Scored from 137 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2000s (7,847 peers).
Summary
After his unfaithful wife dies, a meek, struggling newspaperman relocates with his young daughter and his aunt to his ancestral home in coastal Newfoundland. There he takes a job covering the shipping news for the local paper and slowly rebuilds his confidence, his sense of family, and the possibility of new love amid the harsh weather and old secrets of the town.
The Shipping News (2001) is a film IMDb files under the drama genre.
Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 7,846 2000s films, not against the whole corpus. 137 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 142 reviewers with at least two reviews each feeds the raw-average track.
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 Shipping News 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 137.
Cohort: Films · 2000s
