Hard Times
- heavy
- measured
- bleak
Heavy, measured, measured dickens / industrial, grounded in texture. Nihilistic, mid-stakes, cold, hand-scored across twelve axes of taste.
How every film is hand-scored →A film adaptation of the Charles Dickens novel "Hard Times" set in a Portuguese industrial town of the 1980s.
Our read · Hard Times (1988) reads as a heavy, measured, grounded dickens · industrial · black-white entry — measured in intensity, mid-stakes in scope, cold in temperature, nihilistic 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.
More info & search links
The shape of Hard Times
What watching it is actually like.
“You want a Portuguese social drama adapting Dickens to 1980s industry.”
Skip it tonight — Skip if literary social realism or 80s Portuguese settings feel dry.
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.
Eight films that read most like this one.
Closeness in the twelve-axis space — how the film actually reads, not “people also liked.”
Discussion
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