Film · 2019 · Films · 2010s
Waves
Scored from 181 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2010s (13,059 peers).
Summary
A suburban South Florida family is thrown into emotional turmoil after a charismatic high school wrestler buckles under the weight of his father's expectations, a shoulder injury, and a fracturing relationship. Told in two halves, the film shifts focus to his quieter sister as she tries to find love and forgiveness in the aftermath.
Waves (2019) is a film IMDb files under the drama, romance and sport genres.
Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 152 of whom clear the calibration test. The calibrated figure is built from 181 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 197 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 13,058 2010s films, not against the whole corpus.
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 Waves 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 · 2010s (13,059 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 181.
Cohort: Films · 2010s
