Focus Features

An absolute classic. Almost every line in it is worth repeating to your friends at dinner. Over and over and over again. (Snap oooout of it!) Cher and Olympia Dukakis deliver pitch perfect performances. And it's central theme, that love arises not out of necessity and social expectations but from the heart itself, appealed me to as a gay viewer.

Robert Downey Jr.'s gay character was so utterly refreshing to me, so devoid of stereotypes and cheap humor that my jaw was on the floor when I first saw this one. But that's not the only thing to recommend it. From the director's chair, Jodie Foster takes the classic family comedy paradigm and adds nuance and depth to all of the character-types you expect to find in such a set up.

Don Roos wrote such a, admirably fearless script for this one. The movie has stuck with me for years. Lisa Kudrow's character was another stereotype-smasher at the time, a straight woman filled with anger because she didn't to beat her gay brother at the game of life simply by virtue of being straight. A family film that challenges the expectations and limits of family and marriage.

At its core, this is a movie about embracing the exceptional in ourselves. But it's the slightly insane, heightened family dynamics that provide the high points here. It's one of the wittiest films Pixar has ever made, hands down. Is there a funnier moment in any animated film than the one where Jack Jack starts to shape shift during the final action sequence? I don't think so!

Maybe a bit of a stretch as a family film, but since it's one of my favorite films of all time, it's going on any top five list I make. You could call it an orphan story, a tale of a young man cruelly separated from his family by war and struggling to reconnect. A young Christian Bale delivers a remarkable performance, and his heartbreaking attempts to forge a maternal relationship with the icy Mrs. Victor (Miranda Richardson) provide some of the film's more emotional moments.