Film · 1982 · Films · 1980s
The Verdict
Scored from 195 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1980s (3,141 peers).
Summary
Frank Galvin is a Boston lawyer whose practice has dwindled to drinking and handing out business cards at strangers' wakes, until his old friend Mickey Morrissey passes him a malpractice suit that should settle quietly: a young woman given the wrong anaesthetic in a Catholic hospital's delivery room has been comatose ever since, and her sister wants the money. After visiting the woman on the ward, Galvin turns down the archdiocese's settlement offer without telling his clients and takes the case to a jury, facing Ed Concannon's large defence team and a judge with no patience for him. Sidney Lumet directed David Mamet's adaptation of Barry Reed's novel, with Paul Newman as Galvin, alongside Jack Warden, James Mason and Charlotte Rampling.
Released in 1982, The Verdict is a drama film. It is rated R. The runtime is 129 minutes. It was made in the United States.
195 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 202 reviewers with at least two reviews each feeds the raw-average track. 3,140 other films from the 1980s form the cohort it is ranked inside.
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 Verdict 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 · 1980s (3,141 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 195.
Cohort: Films · 1980s
