Dirty Harry (1971) poster
1971 · crime · thriller · action

Dirty Harry

Directed by Don Siegel1h 42m1971
ElsewhereIMDb7.7180kRT89%Metacritic87TMDB7.53k
  • heavy
  • kinetic
  • extreme
  • cold
Movie DNA

Heavy, breathless, extreme crime / thriller, grounded in texture. Ambivalent, mid-stakes, cold, hand-scored across twelve axes of taste.

How every film is hand-scored →

When a madman dubbed 'Scorpio' terrorizes San Francisco, hard-nosed cop, Harry Callahan – famous for his take-no-prisoners approach to law enforcement – is tasked with hunting down the psychopath.

Our read · Dirty Harry (1971) reads as a heavy, breathless, grounded crime · thriller · action entry — extreme in intensity, mid-stakes in scope, cold in temperature, ambivalent in outlook. Hand-scored on twelve axes of taste — mood, pacing, weirdness, hope, stakes, humour, reality, density, warmth, auteur, intensity, and era — with a derived palette drawn from its dominant cinematography.

Where the cast leads
Fingerprint

The shape of Dirty Harry

Tonight, this looks like

What watching it is actually like.

You want a lean Seventies cop thriller that grabs you from frame one.

ends triumphantit stays with yougrabs you earlygrips from the openattention 4/5breezes by
Date nightWith friendsSoloWith parentsKids around
Heads-upgraphic violencechild peril

Skip it tonightYou cannot stomach vigilante justice and sudden, brutal gun violence tonight.

DNA · twelve axes

The reading.

Each axis is hand-scored — not derived from votes or genre averages. The marker shows where this film sits; the gradient fill uses the film's own cinematography palette.

Mood · HeavyCosy
Pacing · Slow-burnKinetic
Intensity · GentleExtreme
Weirdness · ConventionalSurreal
Hope · NihilisticRedemptive
Stakes · IntimateEpic
Humour · NoneBroad
Reality · GroundedFantastical
Density · SparseTwisty
Warmth · ColdTender
Auteur · TransparentSignature
Your take
Rate it
star-clip-1-0star-clip-2-0star-clip-3-0star-clip-4-0star-clip-5-0
React
Discussion

Discussion

cmd enter to post

What does your Movie DNA look like?

Rate a few films you've seen. We map your taste across the same twelve axes and find the films you'll actually want to watch tonight.

Calibrate yourself