Film · 1968 · Films · 1960s
The Swimmer
Scored from 165 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1960s (1,929 peers).
Summary
Adapted from John Cheever's short story, Frank Perry's drama drops Ned Merrill, a tanned, ageing advertising man wearing nothing but swim trunks, into a neighbour's backyard pool one summer morning in affluent Fairfield County, Connecticut. Noticing that a chain of pools runs across the valley toward his own house, he announces that he will swim home, naming the imaginary waterway after his wife, Lucinda. Pool by pool he crosses the properties of old friends, a former mistress, his daughters' onetime babysitter, and hosts who are markedly less pleased to see him than he anticipates. Each encounter adds a detail that does not fit the life he keeps describing.
Released in 1968, The Swimmer is a drama film. The runtime is 95 minutes. Its certificate is PG. Its country of origin is listed as the United States.
The calibrated figure is built from 165 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 166 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. 1,928 other films from the 1960s form the cohort it is ranked inside. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 3 of whom clear the calibration test.
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 Swimmer 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 · 1960s (1,929 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 165.
Cohort: Films · 1960s
