It was Dustin Hoffman who won the...

It was Dustin Hoffman who won the Oscar for his performance in Rain Man (ABC Sunday at 8 p.m.) as an autistic middle-aged man, but it’s Tom Cruise as his brother who carries this 1988 hit as a wheeler-dealer transformed during a cross-country trip with Hoffman.

Tenderness, a defining intelligence and the sting of real emotion characterize Hugh Hudson’s elegant and ambitious 1984 Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (KCOP Sunday at 8 p.m.), which juxtaposes an enthralling vision of life in the jungle with an ironic view of British civilization. Christopher Lambert and Ralph Richardson star.

The 1986 Stand By Me (KCOP Monday at 8 p.m.) is Rob Reiner’s compassionate, perfectly performed look at the real heart of youth, a treasure told in the form of a memoir, as a writer (Richard Dreyfuss) remembers back to the pivotal summer of 1959. Adapted from a Stephen King story and starring River Phoenix, Wil Wheaton, Corey Feldman and Jerry O’Connell.

While ostensibly sorting out the question of whether men and women can be friends, before or after sex enters the picture, the 1989 When Harry Met Sally ... (ABC Wednesday at 9 p.m.) actually casts a hopeful and persuasive eye on romance today, even on marriage. The question in this 1989 hit, directed by Rob Reiner and written by Nora Ephron, becomes whether Sally (Meg Ryan) and Harry (Billy Crystal) can, over the span of an 11-year friendship, at last fall in love.

In his 1983 comic novel The Feud, Thomas Berger suggests that we fight and die because of stupidity and stubbornness, geography and lies. Unfortunately, the 1989 film version (which airs on KCET Wednesday at 9 p.m.) shows little imagination and even less intensity in its telling of an escalating small-town vendetta. Rene Auberjonois and David Strathairn star.

William Friedkin’s 1985 To Live and Die in L.A. (KTLA Thursday at 8 p.m.) has much of the spirit of his 1971 cop classic “The French Connection” but with the look and feel of Southern California. It’s another true-life police drama, set among counterfeiters, with a high-speed car chase to challenge its famous predecessor. It’s grim, bleak, harrowing--and underrated. With William L. Petersen and Willem Dafoe.

KCET’s Saturday night double feature offers at 9 p.m. Queen of Hearts, a thoroughly inventive and rewarding 1989 comedy-fantasy, and at 11 p.m. another charming British fable, Carol Reed’s 1955 A Kid for Two Farthings.