While everyone remembers this film about an autistic man as Dustin Hoffman's Oscar-winning triumph, it is equally Tom Cruise's. As a fast-talking wheeler-dealer living out the 1980s dream, he learns that not only is he out of his father's will (save for a 1949 Buick), he also has an institutionalised elder brother (Hoffman). This is a classic road movie, with the two siblings crossing country to California in the Buick. Hoffman's savant - a mass of baseball and airline disaster statistics, prone to hysterics if his routine is broken - is one of modern cinema's great triumphs: believable, unsentimental, often hilarious. But without Cruise, whose emotional journey runs from confused and impatient to understanding, protective and eventually loving, there is no film. Director Barry Levinson handles the whole thing beautifully, and also won an Oscar, and the film took the best picture award.

When car dealer Charlie Babbitt learns that his estranged father has died, he returns home to Cincinnati, where he discovers that he has a savant older brother named Raymond and that his father's $3 million fortune is being left to the mental institution in which Raymond lives. Motivated by his father's money, Charlie checks Raymond out of the facility in order to return with him to Los Angeles. The brothers' cross-country trip ends up changing both their lives.