Average Rating: 6.6/10
Reviews Counted: 47
Fresh: 36 | Rotten: 11
No consensus yet.
Average Rating: 6.6/10
Critic Reviews: 7
Fresh: 6 | Rotten: 1
No consensus yet.
liked it
Average Rating: 3.7/5
User Ratings: 158,742
Get your friends' movie recommendations by adding Rotten Tomatoes to your Facebook Timeline.
At the time of its release, Jonathan Demme's Philadelphia was the first big-budget Hollywood film to tackle the medical, political, and social issues of AIDS. Tom Hanks, in his first Academy Award-winning performance, plays Andrew Beckett, a talented lawyer at a stodgy Philadelphia law firm. The homosexual Andrew has contracted AIDS but fears informing his firm about the disease. The firm's senior partner, Charles Wheeler (Jason Robards), assigns Andrew a case involving their most important
Dec 22, 1993 Wide
Sep 9, 1997
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
All Critics (47) | Top Critics (7) | Fresh (37) | Rotten (11) | DVD (15)
[An] extremely well-made message picture about tolerance, justice and discrimination is pitched at mainstream audiences, befitting its position as the first major Hollywood film to directly tackle the disease.
"Philadelphia" mostly succeeds in being forceful, impassioned and moving, sometimes even rising to the full range of emotion that its subject warrants. But too often, even at its most assertive, it works in safely predictable ways.
It's less like a film by Demme than the best of Frank Capra. It is not just canny, corny and blatantly patriotic, but compassionate, compelling and emotionally devastating.
The story is timely and powerful, and the performances of Hanks and Washington assure that the characters will not immediately vanish into obscurity.
This AIDS courtroom drama is so pumped full of nitrous oxide, you could get your teeth drilled on it.
Philadelphia breaks no new dramatic ground ... And yet Philadelphia is quite a good film, on its own terms.
Moving, Oscared '90s drama fostered AIDS empathy.
Safe and apolitical it may be, but Philadelphia succeeds as a deeply affecting humanist drama.
Wearing its heart on its sleeves, this well-intentioned but soft and compromised AIDS drama may nonetheless perform the same function that Paltoon or Schindler's List have: Change public opinion about an urgent problem.
The courtroom stuff is unwieldly, but everything else is brave and moving.
involving but badly cliched
The road to Philadelphia was paved with good intentions.
In the guise of piety, Philadelphia panders to a perceived straight-male majority.
Being under the PC microscope transforms Demme into the bastard offspring of Stanley Kramer and Norman Lear
Manages to be humorous and moving without being too preachy or heavy-handed.
Hanks and Washington shine. This was a great movie and it came out at the right time.
June 29, 2008Super Reviewer
A brave film for its time, this movie touches the aspects of how AIDS and homosexuality as they are being viewed by the majority of the uniformed mass and weaves it all into a compelling court drama. While the great opening sequence with Bruce Springsteen's instant classic tune shows us the city of brotherly love from
June 14, 2006Super Reviewer
| 29% | The Vow |
| 94% | Mission: Impossible Ghost Protoc... |
| 87% | The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo |
| 28% | Underworld Awakening |
| 85% | Chronicle |
| 65% | The Woman in Black |
| 25% | This Means War |
| 94% | The Secret World of Arrietty |
| 36% | Red Tails |
| 88% | Certified Copy (Copie Conforme) |
Red Tails, This Means War
Pictures: Wes Anderson films
Video: Your friendly four minute preview
Trailer: The legend continues!