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Turner Classic Movies, 2:45 p.m., Friday, Feb. 28
Endlessly debated when it was released in 1994, Philadelphia is both an AIDS story sanitized for the masses and yet revolutionary in its depiction of the gay experience. Jonathan Demme’s direction is smooth and restrained, and Tom Hanks’ performance is legendary: so moving, so empathic and so smart. It is an epic and obvious tear-jerker, but it did something that much better, much more interesting and difficult AIDS movies and plays could not: It was seen by millions of heterosexual people who had never thought about AIDS in anything but the abstract. A flawed film, but it must be seen.
