Film · 1959 · Films · 1950s
The World of Apu
Scored from 58 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1950s (561 peers).
Summary
Apu (Soumitra Chatterjee) has dropped out of university for lack of money and lives in a rented room above the Calcutta railway line, giving tuitions, pawning his books and drafting an autobiographical novel. His friend Pulu takes him to a cousin's wedding in a riverside village in East Bengal, where the bridegroom proves to be mad and custom holds that the girl, Aparna (Sharmila Tagore), will be cursed unless she marries that day — so Apu, half in disbelief, takes his place. He brings his sheltered, well-off bride back to the single squalid room, and the match between strangers slowly becomes a real marriage. Satyajit Ray's Bengali-language film closes the Apu Trilogy, scored by Ravi Shankar.
Released in 1959, The World of Apu is a drama film. Its listed language is Bengali. It was made in India. The runtime is 106 minutes.
Only 58 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 65 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track. The cohort it is ranked inside is 1950s films — 561 of them. A second review pool sits behind it as well: 171 Rotten Tomatoes reviewers clear the same calibration test, and Rankquant scores them separately.
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 World of Apu 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 · 1950s (561 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 58.
Cohort: Films · 1950s
