1. Philadelphia (1993) PG-13 | 125 min | Drama 7.7 Rate 66 Metascore When a man with HIV is fired by his law firm because of his condition, he hires a homophobic small time lawyer as the only willing advocate for a wrongful dismissal suit. Director: Jonathan Demme | Stars: Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington, Roberta Maxwell, Buzz Kilman
Erik, a loner, finds a friend in Dexter, an eleven-year-old boy with AIDS. They vow to find a cure for AIDS together and save Dexter's life in an eventful summer. Director: Peter Horton | Stars: Joseph Mazzello, Brad Renfro, Aeryk Egan, Delphine French. Votes: 9,855 | Gross: $2.57M
Budget. $26 million. Box office. $206.7 million. Philadelphia is a 1993 American legal drama film written by Ron Nyswaner, directed by Jonathan Demme and starring Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington. It is notable for being one of the first mainstream Hollywood films to address HIV/AIDS and homophobia .
Jan 31, 2018 · An Early Frost (1985) The first major film, either televised or theatrical, to deal with the AIDS epidemic, Frost stars Aidan Quinn as a gay man who returns home to …
There was the 1985 TV movie An Early Frost, with Aidan Quinn as a gay man whose family is thrown into turmoil when he tells them he has AIDS. Very special episodes of a few TV shows, like L.A. Law and Mr. Belvedere , focused on one-off characters with AIDS.
When a man with HIV is fired by his law firm because of his condition, he hires a homophobic small time lawyer as the only willing advocate for a wrongful dismissal suit. Director: Jonathan Demme | Stars: Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington, Roberta Maxwell, Buzz Kilman. Votes: 237,965 | Gross: $77.32M
Mar 29, 1992 · Something to Live for: The Alison Gertz Story: Directed by Tom McLoughlin. With Molly Ringwald, Lee Grant, Perry King, Roxana Zal. An AIDS-stricken woman becomes a leader in the struggle to educate people about the disease and its prevention.
The film was the first Hollywood big-budget, big-star film to tackle the issue of AIDS in the U.S. (following the TV movie And the Band Played On) and signaled a shift in Hollywood films toward more realistic depictions of people in the LGBT community. Extras cast in this film included 53 people who were AIDS-infected as of the time of shooting the film. By the end of 1994, 43 out of those 53 people had died - demonstrating the close linkage between fiction and fact. According to a Tom Hanks interview for the 1995 documentary The Celluloid Closet, scenes showing more affection between him and Banderas were cut, including one with him and Banderas in bed together. The DVD edition, produced by Automat Pictures, includes this scene.
It was one of the first mainstream Hollywood films to acknowledge HIV/AIDS, homosexuality, and homophobia .
To prove that the lesions would have been visible, Miller asks Beckett to unbutton his shirt while on the witness stand, revealing that his lesions are indeed visible and recognizable as such. Over the course of the trial, Miller's homophobia slowly disappears as he and Beckett bond from working together.
The following day, Beckett is dismissed by the firm's partners. Beckett believes that someone deliberately hid his paperwork to give the firm an excuse to fire him, and that the dismissal is actually a result of his diagnosis with AIDS as well as his sexuality.
Andrew Beckett is a senior associate at the largest corporate law firm in Philadelphia, Wyant, Wheeler, Hellerman, Tetlow and Brown. He hides his homosexuality and his status as an AIDS patient from the other members of the firm. A partner in the firm notices a lesion on Beckett's forehead. Although Beckett attributes the lesion to ...
A year after Bowers' death in 1987, a producer, Scott Rudin had interviewed the Bowers family and their lawyers and, according to the family, promised compensation for the use of Bowers' story as a basis for a film.
Bowers was an attorney who, in 1987, sued the law firm Baker McKenzie for wrongful dismissal in one of the first AIDS discrimination cases. Cain was an attorney for Hyatt Legal Services who was fired after his employer found out he had AIDS. He sued Hyatt in 1990, and won just before his death.
Longtime Companion (1989) Longtime Companion was the first wide-release theatrical film to tackle HIV/AIDS. The title is taken from the words used by the New York Times's description of the partner of someone who had died from an AIDS-related illness.
An Early Frost (1985) The first major film, either televised or theatrical, to deal with the AIDS epidemic, Frost stars Aidan Quinn as a gay man who returns home to break the news to his family that he is living with HIV. It was watched by over 34 million people, garnered 14 Emmy nominations and won 3.
A young woman with HIV strives for an education and a way out from her mother's abuse.
After a Texas man finds out he has AIDS, he refuses to die without any resources and smuggles life-saving drugs from Mexico.
This story set in 1990s Paris tells the story of the intimate relationship between Sean and Nathan, two members of ACT UP Paris, set against the backdrop of the group’s fight to secure medication for people living with HIV.
Parting Glances (1986) In Steve Buscemi ’s first major film role, he plays a gay man living with HIV. The director, Bill Sherwood, died of an AIDS-related illness in 1990 without completing another film.
Eric Roberts plays a man dying from AIDS who throws a party before he plans to kill himself. One of the first films to address the topic of someone living with AIDS and dying on their own terms, the film was based on the life of Harry Stein, director Randal Kleiser’s ex-lover.
Tom Hanks won the Oscar for Best Actor for playing the film’s hero, Andrew Beckett, a gay lawyer with AIDS, and Bruce Springsteen won an Oscar and multiple Grammys for his haunting song “Streets of Philadelphia,” which opens the film. Twenty-five years later, it’s abundantly clear that Philadelphia is a landmark movie, ...
In 1988, screenwriter Ron Nyswaner got a distraught phone call from filmmaker Jonathan Demme. Demme’s best friend, the illustrator Juan Botas, had just been diagnosed with AIDS — then a death sentence that promised unspeakable suffering.
After their initial conversation, it still took Demme and Nyswaner four years to come up with a script that lived up to their ambitions for the film. For the first two of those years, all they did was bat around possible plots and genres. “The only one that I really remember was a little bit like Dallas Buyers Club ,” Nyswaner said, evoking the 2013 film about an AIDS patient smuggling in drugs from Mexico. “There were experimental treatments coming across the border, so I know at one point we thought about, like, a caper.”
An early draft of the script, he said, included a scene in which Andy has to come out to his mother, tell her he’s been fired, and that he has AIDS. “It’s in a restaurant, and she makes a scene, and all that kind of stuff,” he said.
He initially begs off working with Andy out of his fear of AIDS and loathing of gay people, and only agrees to take the case after he witnesses Andy experiencing the kind of casual discrimination in a law library that Joe knows all too well as a black man trying to build a career as a lawyer.
Joe’s slow-burn friendship with Andy — a tried-and-true convention of progressive message movies like In the Heat of the Night, in which a bigoted person learns to appreciate the humanity of the people he’s meant to hate — ends up forming the heart of the movie.
But when Nyswaner handed in his four-hour script, it was soon after Steven Soderbergh’s Behind the Candelabra — starring Michael Douglas as the famously flamboyant (and also closeted) performer Liberace, who also died from AIDS — had aired on HBO.
Based on the true-life story of one young, pretty, intelligent, middle-class and HIV/AIDS stricken Alison (Ali) Gertz.
Alison Gertz was born February 27, 1966 and passed away August 8, 1992.
By what name was Something to Live for: The Alison Gertz Story (1992) officially released in Canada in English?
In this poignant gay cinema classic, the first film to address the AIDS pandemic, a New York City gay man in a monogamous relationship becomes a "buddy" or volunteer bedside companion to another gay man dying of AIDS. The last film directed by 70s and 80s gay film pioneer Arthur J.
This was the first film to deal with the AIDS pandemic in the early 1980s, preceding An Early Frost (1985) by two months.
By what name was Buddies (1985) officially released in Canada in English?
The first mainstream queer film of the new millennium, Brokeback Mountain u shered its themes into the mainstream. Heath Ledger's shy Ennis del Mar falls in what he cannot articulate as love with Jake Gyllenhaal's Jack Twist over a long, lonely winter, and their lives bounce off each other's for years afterward.
Charming Irish movie that answers the question: “What if John Hughes were Irish and gay?” Misfit Ned struggles at a rugby-obsessed boarding school until a mysterious new kid moves in and an unlikely friendship changes them both. Along the way, a rousing performance from Andrew Scott as an inspiring teacher with a secret of his own, and a rugby game set to a Rufus Wainwright song. Just the thing to lift your spirits.
Norman Rene's film follows a group of gay men through the early years of the AIDS crisis, one day per year, starting on the day the New York Times first covered the story of the "gay cancer.". A deep meditation on grief, gallows humor, and the families we make with our friends.
When Megan (Natasha Lyonne) shows more interest in being a vegetarian and female-fronted folk rock, her parents send her away to have her presumed homosexuality cured. Conversion therapy is no joke, but Jamie Babbit's satire perfectly skewers puritanical homophobia on its head—and it has a joyful, happy ending. (Plus, RuPaul!)
The first wide-release studio film with a homosexual relationship at its center (and for decades, the last). Making Love follows Michael Ontkean's Zack, who is married to Claire (Kate Jackson) but exploring his homosexuality with Harry Hamlin's Bart.
Eliza Hittman's dark and moody film plays out a bit like a thriller, one in which a Brooklyn teenager named Frankie (a superb Harris Dickinson, in a nearly wordless performance), who spends his idle hours hanging with his delinquent friends, fooling around with his girlfriend, or hooking up with men he meets online. Beach Rats is a provocative look at the personal and secret urges we often fear will come out into the light.
Long before his groundbreaking Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee directed this sweet, comic tale about a Taiwanese immigrant living in New York with his partner. When he offers to marry a Chinese woman so she can obtain a green card, the marriage of convenience spirals out of control when his parents find out and throw a lavish wedding party.
1) Beautiful Thing. The 1996 British film Beautiful Thing follows Jamie, a teenage boy who is infatuated with his classmate, Ste. While Jamie is bullied in school, Ste is dealing with an abuse at home. Jamie’s mother, Sandra, offers Ste an escape from his alcoholic father, which results in Jamie and Ste sharing a bed and a kiss.
the Homo Sapiens Agenda) follows the story of typical, suburban high school senior Simon Spier as he tries to navigate life after being blackmailed and threatened with outing by one of his classmates while also trying to figure out the identity of his anonymous, romantic, online pen pal named Blue.
The 1996 comedy The Birdcage (the American remake of La Cage aux Folles ) follows Armand, the owner of a drag club in South Beach called The Birdcage and is partner Albert who’s drag persona Starina is the club’s star attraction. When Armand’s son Val announces he’s marrying a woman with ultraconservative parents, Armand and Albert try to pull off a ridiculous farce. The all-star cast (Robin Williams, Gene Hackman, Nathan Lane, and Dianne Wiest), over the top situations, and light tone make this the perfect movie for an evening where you just don’t feel like watching anything heavy.
The 1987 British drama Maurice is based on the E.M. Forster novel of the same name . The film is set in early 20th century England and follows Maurice Hall from his childhood to early adulthood. Maurice struggles with his feelings, but eventually meets his life partner Alec Scudder. Though society condemns their relationship, they’re willing to give up anything to be together.
2) Shelter . The 2007 movie Shelter follows Zach, an aspiring artist who puts his college dreams on hold to help out his family. He falls for his best friend’s brother, Shaun, but struggles with his feelings. While their families are initially uncomfortable, they accept the relationship by the end of the film.
He swears off sex because of the AIDS crisis, and then meets and falls for Steve, an HIV positive man. He realizes he has to confront his fears to live and love fully.
The romantic coming-of-age drama The Way He Looks has a happy falling in love with your best friend and riding off into the sunset ending that so many straight high school romance movies have. The film follows Leonardo, a blind high school student, as he falls for new student Gabriel. It’s also available to stream on Netflix.