Starring
Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington, Antonio Banderas

A winner of two Oscars from five nominations, Jonathan Demme directs Tom Hanks as Andrew Beckett, an up-and-coming young lawyer who suspects his dismissal from a prestigious law firm may have been due to his contracting AIDS.

He hires homophobic ambulance chaser Joe Miller (Denzel Washington), to sue his former employer for wrongful termination as his old firm is so powerful that no attorney in Philadelphia wants to take it on. For Andrew the battle is clear-cut: he's fighting for his reputation, for his life, for justice. But for Joe, separated from Andrew by a deep social and cultural chasm, there is a different kind of struggle as he confronts his own fears and prejudices about homosexuals.

Trivia:
Tom Hanks lost 26 pounds during his role for this film; Denzel Washington's law firm includes the name "Shilts", a reference to author/AIDS activist Randy Shilts, and writer of the book "And the Band Played On"; there was a statistic that there were 53 gay men who appeared in various scenes in this movie and within the next year, 43 of them had died.

Directed by
Jonathan Demme