Film · 2014 · Films · 2010s
Whiplash
Scored from 1,441 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2010s (13,059 peers).
Summary
Damien Chazelle's drama follows Andrew Neiman, a nineteen-year-old drummer in his first year at the Shaffer Conservatory in Manhattan, who is pulled out of a second-tier ensemble into the school's elite studio band. Its conductor, Terence Fletcher, teaches by humiliation: he hurls furniture and abuse, runs tempo drills until hands bleed, and keeps an alternate ready to take any chair. Andrew answers by practicing past the point of injury, dropping the girlfriend he has barely started seeing and sneering at relatives who treat music as a hobby. The film narrows to a contest of wills over whether that method produces greatness or only damage.
Whiplash is a 2014 drama and music film. It was made in the United States. It runs 1h 46m and carries an R certificate.
13,058 other films from the 2010s form the cohort it is ranked inside. 1,441 IMDb reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, and those are the ones the calibrated score reads; a separate, broader pool of 1,521 reviewers with at least two reviews each feeds the raw-average track. A second review pool sits behind it as well: 4,140 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 Whiplash 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 1,441.
Cohort: Films · 2010s
