Film · 2005 · Films · 2000s
The Squid and the Whale
Scored from 235 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2000s (7,847 peers).
Summary
In 1980s Brooklyn, two brothers navigate the bitter divorce of their self-absorbed novelist father and their increasingly successful writer mother. As the family splits time between two households, the boys take sides and act out, with the older son mimicking his father's pretensions while the younger one spirals into troubling behavior.
Released in 2005, The Squid and the Whale is a comedy and drama film. Its comedy subtype is Dramedy.
235 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 243 reviewers with at least two reviews each feeds the raw-average track. 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 Squid and the Whale 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 235.
Cohort: Films · 2000s
