Film · 2009 · Films · 2000s
The Soloist
Scored from 146 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2000s (7,847 peers).
Summary
Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez discovers Nathaniel Ayers, a homeless musician playing a two-string violin on the streets of Skid Row, and learns he is a former Juilliard student whose promising career was derailed by schizophrenia. As Lopez writes about Ayers and tries to help him reclaim his life and music, the two form an unlikely friendship that challenges Lopez's assumptions about mental illness, dignity, and what it means to help another person.
The Soloist (2009) is a film IMDb files under the biography, drama and music genres.
The calibrated figure is built from 146 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 146 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 7,846 2000s 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 Soloist 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 146.
Cohort: Films · 2000s
