For Fans of Dustin Hoffman

Tootsie (1982) gets remembered as a comedy about a man dressing as a woman to get work. What it actually is: a meticulous portrait of an ego so large it could only be punctured by becoming someone else. Michael Dorsey is insufferable and right about everything, which is precisely the problem. Hoffman spent months working with Larry Gelbart to make every scene carry real weight beneath the farce. The result is rare: a film that is genuinely funny and genuinely uncomfortable about the same things at the same time.

Before Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), Hollywood fathers were either noble providers or comic incompetents. Ted Kramer is neither: he is a man who discovers parenting only after losing his marriage, and the film refuses to make him sympathetic by erasing his flaws. Hoffman fought with director Robert Benton throughout production, improvising scenes and pushing for harder edges. The friction shows in the work. It remains one of the most honest films about divorce, custody, and the slow work of becoming a present parent.

Rain Man (1988) could easily have been a redemption arc dressed in sentiment. What keeps it honest is Hoffman's commitment to Raymond Babbitt as a person with a specific, consistent interior world, not a device for Charlie's growth. The film's emotional power comes from Charlie slowly learning to see Raymond on Raymond's terms rather than his own. Tom Cruise is essential too: his performance as a man gradually losing his self-absorption is the film's real arc. It earns everything it asks you to feel.

Zach Helm's 2006 film gave Hoffman one of his strangest roles and one of his warmest: Professor Jules Hilbert, a literary theorist who becomes the unlikely key to a man's survival. The film works as a meditation on authorship and mortality, but it also works because every character in it is fully inhabited. Hoffman's scenes with Will Ferrell, the most unlikely pairing in his filmography, are unexpectedly moving. It is the kind of mid-budget studio film that stopped being made almost immediately after it was released.