Film · 1987 · Films · 1980s
The Whales of August
Scored from 47 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1980s (3,141 peers).
Summary
Two elderly widowed sisters, the blind and imperious Libby Strong and the patient Sarah Webber, open their weathered cottage on an island off the coast of Maine for another summer, as they have since girlhood, when they would watch for the whales that came past in August. Sarah keeps the house and her sister going and is tempted by the idea of a picture window facing the sea; Libby, who refuses any change, treats the plan and their visiting Russian émigré neighbour Mr. Maranov as intrusions on a life she has decided to wind down. Over a single day, old grievances and the question of whether the sisters can keep sharing the house come to the surface. Lindsay Anderson's chamber drama, from David Berry's play, stars Lillian Gish and Bette Davis with Vincent Price and Ann Sothern.
Released in 1987, The Whales of August is a drama film. The runtime is 90 minutes. It was made in the United States. It is rated PG.
Only 47 of its IMDb reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, so the calibrated figure rests on a thin sample; a broader pool of 49 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track. The cohort it is ranked inside is 1980s films — 3,141 of them.
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 Whales of August 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 47.
Cohort: Films · 1980s
