Philadelphia

Tom Hanks won an Oscar playing a lawyer fired for having AIDS, and Denzel Washington plays the homophobic attorney who takes the case and slowly stops being one. It is a courtroom film with the edges filed off, and queer critics said so at the time: the couple barely touch, the camera keeps its distance, the audience it is speaking to is plainly not us.

All true, and it still mattered. This was the first time a major studio asked mainstream America to sit with a dying gay man and feel something, and enough of them did that the culture moved. Watch it as history rather than as romance, and the Maria Callas scene will still take you apart.