Rain Man (1988)

Excellent drama directed by Barry Levinson. 

Charlie Babbit (Tom Cruise) is a car dealer having business problems. He’s selfish and brash. After his father dies, Charlie learns that he has been denied an inheritance but also finds out that he has a brother, Raymond (Dustin Hoffman), who lives in a mental institution and who is described as an “autistic savant”. Charlie essentially kidnaps him, hoping to get his share of the will. But then his relationship with his brother begins to develop. 

Tom Cruise delivers his best ever performance because the script and direction are so strong that even he can’t mess them up. Hoffman is extremely compelling, too. You wonder, however, what autism organisations make of his portrayal. Is it accurate or does it simplify and mislead? 

The film works as a “road movie”, with the car trip being a central motif. Ultimately, it’s a touching character study.

A Few Good Men (1992)

Directed by Rob Reiner (adapted from a play by Aaron Sorkin), but not up to his usual standards. 

Tom Cruise plays a military lawyer who has to defend a pair of US marines accused of killing a soldier at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. He spends a lot of time fiddling with his baseball bat. Demi Moore plays Lieutenant Commander Joanne Galloway. Jack Nicholson is a suspicious colonel. Kiefer Sutherland and Kevin Bacon also feature. 

It’s a little like a TV movie in places, and the music seems generic. Tom Cruise is exactly like he is in all his other films – cocky, fast-talking and apparently good at everything. Demi Moore struggles with a role that’s not really fleshed out. Only Jack Nicholson holds your attention, and even he isn’t given much to go on. Unless you’re keen on Cruise and his standard range of tics, it’s oddly unfulfilling.

Oblivion (2013)

Derivative, shallow sci-fi starring Tom Cruise. I probably wouldn’t have bought this DVD, but I watched it because I found it being given away on a wall. 

The plot is rather confused, but Google usefully summarises it as follows: “Jack Harper, a drone repairman stationed on Earth that has been ravaged by war with extraterrestrials, questions his identity after rescuing the woman who keeps appearing in his dreams.”

That woman is Olga Kurylenko, who, like Cruise, hardly gets any dialogue at all. Another barely filled-in, completely thrown-away character is played by Morgan Freeman, who struggles to convey the grizzled leader of a band of human survivors. 

There are so many things wrong with Oblivion:

• As usual, Tom Cruise is a good-at-everything action-hero dullard who manages to save the world single-handedly. It’s Top Gun all over again. 

• In the absence of dialogue – or any kind of personality – Tom spends much of the film staring moodily yet conveying little emotion.

• Almost every element is borrowed from another sci-fi film. 

• We visit the remains of what used to be New York, but it’s nothing but lush, clean and green vistas. Where’s all the rubble and filth? Could it be transformed that thoroughly in just 60 years?

• There are plot holes aplenty. Best not to ask many questions. 

• Attempts to be “philosophical” end up hollow and self-conscious. 

• When we finally meet the alien presence, it’s a huge let-down. 

• The title has absolutely nothing to do with anything in the film. It's like they wanted a high-impact, single-word title, but all of the relevant words had already been taken.