Film · 2009 · Films · 2000s
Whatever Works
Scored from 173 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2000s (7,847 peers).
Summary
Boris Yellnikoff, a misanthropic former physics professor in New York, grudgingly takes in Melodie, a naive young runaway from the South. Their unlikely arrangement turns into a marriage, until Melodie's conservative mother and father arrive from Mississippi and find their own lives upended by the city. Woody Allen's comedy follows the tangled romantic reshuffling that follows, arguing that happiness comes from whatever works.
Whatever Works (2009) is a film IMDb files under the comedy and romance genres. Inside comedy it is classed as Romcom.
Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 2,180 of whom clear the calibration test. The cohort it is ranked inside is 2000s films — 7,847 of them. The calibrated figure is built from 173 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 175 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 Whatever Works 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 · 2000s (7,847 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 173.
Cohort: Films · 2000s
