12 Best Dustin Hoffman Movies

'Mrs. Robinson, you're trying to seduce me. Aren't you?' As aimless college graduate Benjamin Braddock, who gets entangled in an affair with an older family friend, Hoffman gave voice to the existential disillusionment of an entire generation. The final scene at the back of a city bus, set to Simon & Garfunkel, is one of the most meaningful moments in film history.

'Definitely, definitely.' Hoffman spent months with savants to portray autistic Raymond Babbitt with the utmost precision and respect. His rhythmic cadence, fear of change and unexpected mathematical gifts in Las Vegas earned him his second Oscar for Best Actor. His chemistry with Tom Cruise is timeless.

'I'm walkin' here! I'm walkin' here!' As the coughing, limping small-time crook Ratso Rizzo, trying to survive in a condemned New York building with a naive Texan hustler (Jon Voight), Hoffman delivered a raw, devastating performance. It remains the only X-rated film ever to win the Oscar for Best Picture.

When his wife (Meryl Streep) suddenly leaves him, career-driven ad man Ted has to learn to care for his young son on his own. The scene where he botches French toast and the later heart-wrenching custody battle earned Hoffman his well-deserved first Oscar.

As chain-smoking, persistent Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein, Hoffman and Robert Redford's Bob Woodward formed the most famous journalistic duo in history. Alan J. Pakula's thriller shows the painstaking, dogged investigative work that led to the fall of President Nixon.

A difficult, stubborn New York actor disguises himself as a woman to land a role on a hospital soap opera, and grows into a feminist icon. Hoffman played Dorothy with so much empathy and conviction that it became far more than a simple dress-up comedy: a brilliant film about gender and respect.

'Is it safe?' The dentist torture scene with Laurence Olivier still sends shivers down the spine. As a history student and runner caught up in a Nazi conspiracy involving stolen diamonds, Hoffman reportedly stayed up for nights to make Babe's total physical and mental exhaustion believable.

Opposite Steve McQueen's untamable urge to escape, Hoffman plays the fragile, intellectual forger Louis Dega in the notorious penal colony of French Guiana. His thick glasses and brittle dignity make his slow resignation to prison life deeply tragic.

In Sam Peckinpah's nerve-racking psychological thriller, Hoffman plays a mild-mannered American mathematician who moves with his wife to the English countryside. When local men invade his home, a primitive, chilling spiral of violence awakens in him.

With a lavish mustache, velvet coats and a silver hook, Hoffman visibly relishes every second as Peter Pan's archenemy in Steven Spielberg's fairy-tale adventure. His theatrical elegance and childish tantrums toward Smee (Bob Hoskins) are priceless.

As an eccentric Hollywood producer hired by a political spin doctor (Robert De Niro) to stage a fake war in Albania to cover up a presidential scandal, Hoffman delivers a peerless satire of media deception that earned him an Oscar nomination.

Together with Barbra Streisand, Hoffman injected pure chaos into this comedy hit. As hyper-liberal, hugging, capoeira-dancing dad Bernie Focker, he's the perfect comic contrast to Robert De Niro's paranoid ex-CIA father-in-law.