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5. To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

For the fifth place entry, however, I have to go with the movie adaption of Harper Lee’s all-time classic, To Kill a Mockingbird. Gregory Peck pulls off the unbelievable in portraying so deftly the beloved Atticus Finch, tasked with the impossible case of defending a black man for the murder of a white woman in the highly-prejudiced South. As you undoubtedly know, his life and that of his family are imperiled along the way, and his sense of right and wrong, of justice and honor, are challenged at every step.

Courtroom dramas normally feature a final scene of redemption and justice that is supposed to restore your faith in the effectiveness of the courts, lawyers, and the justice system. (Hollywood is a bizarre place, given how despair abounds, by contrast, in movies about love).

What makes To Kill a Mockingbird noteworthy, however, is that it does not feature that easy, climatic courtroom scene and instead takes us back to that time when art (literature and their cinematic adaptations) was not afraid to point out social injustices. Sure, Atticus is a hero and his acts save the innocent characters, in his own way, in the end. Undoubtedly, your faith in at least lawyers is supposed to be restored. But the condemnation of the system is ever present, and deserved, and no less prominent than Atticus’s do-good personality.

4. Philadelphia (1993)

Speaking of somewhat unrealistic portrayals, my fourth pick is Philadelphia, a movie with cultural and movie-related repercussions that are hard to quantify despite the somewhat unrealistic pairing of its heroes.

Tom Hanks won his first of back-to-back Oscars (becoming the last person to date to achieve this rare feat) for his portrayal of an AIDS-stricken lawyer who files an impossible lawsuit against the firm that fired him because of his condition. His Oscar speech is one of the most moving speeches I have ever heard (and it inspired another movie in which an actor wins an award and unwittingly outs his gay drama teacher - the 1997 Kevin Kline comedy In & Out). That’s one cultural repercussion. The other, of course, is Bruce Springsteen’s “The Streets of Philadelphia,” a touching song that also took home an Oscar and still reverberates today.

The last is, obviously, that this was perhaps the first mainstream movie to talk openly about the HIV epidemic that had by then afflicted the country for 10 years, and, at the same time, to touch upon the realities of many gay Americans at the time. Taking tremendous and brave career risks, Antonio Banderas and Tom Hanks played lovers, while, in another risky move, Denzel Washington portrayed a somewhat homophobic lawyer tasked with prosecuting Hanks’ civil lawsuit.

Yes, the movie falls into the inevitable courtroom drama trap of making a hero of the lawyer, but all is forgiven when the heart the story conveys is so touchingly translated into those scenes in which Washington’s character finally wakes up to the reality of his client. On its own, the movie is touching and memorable. As a landmark civil rights movie, however, it is also noteworthy and memorable.

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