Film · 2021 · Films · 2020s
Val
Scored from 194 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2020s (7,930 peers).
Summary
Val Kilmer filmed himself for forty years, and this documentary is assembled largely from his own home movies, audition tapes and behind-the-scenes footage from Top Gun, The Doors, Tombstone, Batman Forever and The Island of Dr. Moreau. Having lost his voice to throat cancer and a tracheotomy, Kilmer has his son Jack read the narration in his place. Directors Ting Poo and Leo Scott cut between the archive and the present, where Kilmer signs autographs on the fan-convention circuit and tries to mount his one-man Mark Twain show. His Juilliard training and the death of his younger brother Wesley run through both timelines.
Val (2021) is a film IMDb files under the biography and documentary genres. The runtime is 109 minutes. Its certificate is R. Its country of origin is listed as the United States.
Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 73 of whom clear the calibration test. The cohort it is ranked inside is 2020s films — 7,930 of them. The calibrated figure is built from 194 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 201 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead.
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 Val 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 · 2020s (7,930 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 194.
Cohort: Films · 2020s
