Trial by television: "Primetime"

Here is the first of two talking-point movies headed our way from the filmmaker Lance Oppenheim. In a few weeks, we'll finally get to see Oppenheim's much-heralded doc You Can See Everything, in which the director and Nathan Fielder apply a pincer movement to the household of disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. All-American sociopathy - ultra-mediated sociopathy - similarly sits at the heart of Primetime, a dramatised study of the tarnished journalist Chris Hansen, best known as the polished host of NBC's post-millennial reality-TV ratings grabber To Catch a Predator. To my knowledge, that show never aired on UK TV, where a different set of standards and practices applied, and thus it never had to be pulled from the schedules, as it was in America, after one of the show's more illustrious targets killed himself on camera. Some of the context and backstory was covered in last year's documentary Predators, with its suggestively pluralised title; Oppenheim, for his part, commits to exploring the show's more performative aspects. Predator's (actually not un-Fielder-like) set-up involved hired actors luring actual and potential sex offenders to a given location and then exposing the latter - sometimes literally - at the heart of primetime before they were carted off by waiting cops; the designer suited, carefully coiffed Hansen (played here by Robert Pattinson) assumed the multiple roles of presenter, producer, judge, jury and (in the end) executioner. As a premise for an hour-long television show building on the success of Cops and priming viewers for Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, it has a ghoulishly obvious appeal, yet what Oppenheim and screenwriter Ajon Singh are interested in is how this iron horse of the NBC evening schedules went dramatically off the rails, if ever it had guidelines to begin with.

Much like the recent streaming docs The Swan: Behind the Mirror and Reality Check: Inside America's Next Top Model, Primetime may be most interesting as part of a process whereby consumers of old media grow up and begin questioning what on earth they were being raised on. As a feature, it's really doing no more than heavily underlining what some of us saw in reality TV from the off: that its cheap salaciousness made it irresistible for executives and thus deadly for scripted drama and comedy, that its default position was making dupes, fools and monsters of ordinary people. (These shows seemed like the fall of Western civilisation even before they gave a platform to Donald Trump and Andrew Tate.) Singh's critique, granted, extends along multiple lines: that To Catch a Predator was haphazardly produced, forever skimping on care provision while chasing its next victims ("we shoot the rehearsal"); that it, too, lured in and jeopardised innocents (represented here by Skyler Gisondo as a jobbing actor hired to pose as a fresh-faced child); that it fed into the conspiratorial thinking behind, say, Pizzagate; and that Hansen was less the saint and saviour he presented himself as than a toxic combination of male ego and white knight syndrome. (Pattinson, adding another strange little guy to his showreel, makes the character slick to the point of being actively slippery: even off the clock, pursuing an extramarital affair on his travels, he resembles the grubbiest imaginable idea of a vigilante, a Bruce Wayne who's strayed badly off-course.) Cinematically, we're back in the territory of 2014's Nightcrawler, although Oppenheim - who first broke through with the heavily stylised doc Some Kind of Heaven - pushes his image even further: unnerving full-face close-ups catching every last bead of flop sweat, everything and everyone lit like the cover of a lurid Fifties paperback. The encounter sequences are shot and cut in a way that makes Primetime something of a generational landmark, as the first A24 film to have been visibly influenced by the work of Paul Thomas Anderson: no conventional exposition, a steady flow of images, allowing the viewer to feel their way into this milieu, in as much as we want to get close to anybody here.

And that, finally, is Primetime's big problem: editorially, the movie is both judgier and doomier than Anderson, flipping the exploitation of a Boogie Nights on its belly and bearing witness only to the damage and harm caused by this particular media circus. (Oddly, Primetime retains something of Anderson's interest in warped, makeshift family units: Hansen is framed as an absent and wayward father, Merritt Wever's pill-popping producer Abby Bender a stressy mother, Gisondo as the Wahlberg-like kid who needs protection. At one point, the latter can even be seen tossing a baseball around with Hansen.) There may now be no other way of approaching To Catch a Predator, yet as a film, Primetime lacks any thrilling wildness. Singh is telling a small and squalid story, mostly played out in chatrooms, motels and kitchens; the behaviour Oppenheim's camera is left to document constitutes nobody's finest hour exactly. It does feel a limitation that this particular flow of images was instigated by gutter journalism: in the absence of having anywhere new or unexpected to go, the movie mostly leaves us circling the plughole, along with some especially grimy backwash. (You may well come away feeling an urgent need for a warm shower.) The closing scenes, granted, gain a welcome kick of comic energy from Bokeem Woodbine as the gung-ho, good-ol'-boy sheriff who helped precipitate the final mise en abîme ("paedos are not allowed in Texas"), but there's simply not all that much one can take away from this sordid affair, save that the ethics of the Bush II era were questionable in the extreme (duh), and that those who shout the loudest about Protecting Our Children are often those from whom we have most to fear. You can see everything with hindsight, it transpires, but it doesn't always make for the most edifying spectacle.

Primetime is now showing in cinemas nationwide.

Medium-high spirits: "Ghosts: The Possession of Button House"

Just in time for Hallowe'en, a big-screen offshoot from the sitcom that became an exportable format, the new holy grail of cash-strapped British broadcasters. Full disclosure: I decided, after only a couple of episodes, that Ghosts wasn't quite my tempo, being on some level a kids' show - recognisably the next project of the team who'd triumphed with Horrible Histories - elevated (again successfully, by most accounts) into the very heart of primetime. Arriving with an unmistakable air of the Children's Film Foundation about it - I say that as far from a diss, as someone raised on Egghead's Ghost and such like - The Possession of Button House leans even more heavily into that juvenilia, possibly hoping to draw back the crowds who massed at the multiplex for co-writer/star Simon Farnaby's Paddington and Magic Faraway Tree reboots. Now there are teenagers (on BMXs!) breaking into the haunted pile left abandoned at the end of the final episode, temporarily pausing developers' plans to repurpose Button House as a swanky hotel-restaurant complex. To sound the alarm, the House's spectral residents elect to send one of their own out into the wider world; unfortunately, for their hopes, their chosen candidate is disgraced Tory MP Julian (Farnaby, trouserless but otherwise apparently modelled on Robert Kilroy-Silk) who co-opts the slouchy human form of one delinquent (Scott Ellis Watson, the young John Davidson in I Swear), while his fellow ghosts - caveman, closeted major, kooky aristocrat, clueless Northern scout leader, surprise heartthrob Mathew Baynton et al. - keep the lad's spirit occupied (or hostage). By hook or by crook, all the Ghosts will end up wearing children's clothes, and they will all end up pedalling Raleigh Choppers into the climax; somewhere in here is a parable of middle-aged creatives attempting to rediscover their youth (while recreating their hit TV show's halcyon days).

As with Horrible Histories, that original show was the handiwork of emerging character actors determining to wrestle back some control over their careers - or simply give themselves something fun to do between more routine gigs - by penning their own material. They're all back here, even Charlotte Richie and Kiell Smith-Bynoe as the couple who left Button House at the end of the series, and the great Geoff McGovern as meddling neighbour Barclay. It's just that this team are now writing something to do while a simultaneously flimsy and convoluted plot untangles itself around them. We get flickers of creative inspiration: an early, choice Brexit gag (given away for free in the teaser trailer) chimes nicely with the breezy national seachange around that once-accursed topic. Mostly, the comedy is mined from safe, familiar, very British subjects: the cost of train travel, Juliet Bravo, the Honey Monster, stinging nettles, Rennies. (There is one expert deployment of the still-underused term "boffins".) The obvious limitation is that the Ghosts remain sitcom creations, impervious to significant or lasting change: occasional flashbacks reveal their younger selves doing the same thing they're doing today, while the grand finale leaves them where they've always been, with just a few more rounds to play in their eternal trivia quiz. Still, if it's certainly never as boldly inventive as, say, The League of Gentlemen's Apocalypse - still the high watermark in the sitcom-to-film channel, undertaken by folks who knew what separates movies from television and who proved willing to try something radical with established characters - this isn't Holiday on the Buses, either: instead, we're watching a well-drilled ensemble getting back into their collective groove while taking a lap of honour. At a time when so little original comedy is being commissioned for either film or television, it does feel as if we're having to make do with an extended TV special: Button House will doubtless air on BBC1 next Christmas, and it'll lose nothing essential in the transition. But reader, I cannot lie: I did titter.

Ghosts: The Possession of Button House is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

The exiles: "Fatherland"

It might seem perverse to describe the 80-minute Fatherland as a substantial extension of the Paweł Pawlikowski filmography, but here we are. After the perfect miniature of 2013's Ida (82 minutes) and the comparatively epic romance of 2018's Cold War (89 minutes), Pawlikowski's latest combines both a snapshot of post-War German life and a radiograph of one especially tangled family unit: father, son and daughter. The father is identifiable enough as the esteemed author Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler), joined here in 1949, returning home from his lengthy American exile for a series of speaking engagements intended to position him as the kind of literary conscience and progressive thinker the new Germany sorely needs; he is met, on the whole, with a hero's welcome, but also unnerving notes of discord, courtesy of those who regard the writer as a traitorous elite who never had to suffer in the way so many of his fellow Germans have. He is accompanied on this round trip by his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller), a sometime actress pressganged into serving as simultaneously her father's assistant, editor and dresser; she's the one who has to deal with the hate mail waiting for them in the pigeonholes of Germany's finest hotels. Both appear haunted by the fate of Thomas's son - and Erika's brother - Klaus (August Diehl), glimpsed in a prologue as a young bohemian inhabiting his own exile, evading any post-War guilt (and the other burdens that came with being German in 1949) through casual sex and drug abuse. Already, I hope, you'll have some idea of how much Pawlikowski squeezes into his typically elegant, monochrome, squared-off frames. On one side of the screen, literary respectability: the functions, the press conferences, the state-sponsored banquets. On the other, abject dishevelment: bombed out buildings, wounded and hurt people. The Manns' trip was conceived to help bridge the gap between these two Germanys while also helping to rebuild a culture and a country. But that's an awful weight to put on tender human shoulders, and the reality - such as Pawlikowski sees it - was an awkward, hesitant dance, a collective shuffle around the black holes of recent history, everyone doing their darnedest to avoid what would have been the more potent N-word in this specific context: that of Nazism.

A purely British film on a similar historical moment - perhaps one dramatising Erika's marriage to the poet W.H. Auden - would doubtless try and cosy certain aspects up for notionally easier consumption. What Pawlikowski pulls off instead is a contrast between plentiful period elegance - returning, at one point, to the big bands and ballrooms of Cold War, complete with a singing cameo for that film's Joanna Kulig - and the altogether haphazard human behaviour he places front and centre. Thomas crosses paths with Wagner's grandsons Wieland and Wolfgang (Enno and Theo Trebs) and tells them, in no uncertain terms, that Bayreuth should be razed to the ground and their mother arrested; at the same function, Erika slaps her ex-husband Gustaf Gründgens (Joachim Meyerhoff), the actor who inspired her brother's novel Mephisto; later, daughter is left aghast at her father's insistence at carrying on in the face of personal tragedy. Though they come this way to sow the seeds of culture, what the Manns most often encounter on their travels is scorched earth and salted ground. It is, though, stirring for us to be presented with a film that is so compelled by the idea of culture: in the TikTok era, who else but Pawlikowski would have thought about making - and then been financed to make - a film about Thomas Mann? (The loftiness of the film's subject even occasions a droll joke of sorts: while travelling between gigs, the writer is informed by a functionary petitioning to appoint Mann as Germany's poet laureate that his Nobel Prize "carries no weight here".) But even today - as this nomadic filmmaker surely understands more than most - culture remains a means of renegotiating one's place in this world. In a year when the far-right AfD have made gains across a newly divided Germany, why not make a movie about Thomas Mann? Clive James once voted the author "the twentieth-century cultural figure most likely to keep coming back into the student's life", and some trace, some echo of the historical moment Fatherland evokes does appear to have persisted into our present, whether the literal threat of the boozy fascists Erika chides for singing beerhall anthems outside her hotel window or the more ambient gloom of Klaus's despair. The Manns, too, are having to rebuild while attempting to comprehend what the hell has just happened. 

And that, finally, is what keeps Fatherland from becoming so lofty it drifts off into some academic ether: at a crucial point, the history is allowed to recede slightly, revealing two mortal souls attempting to pull one another up out of a bombshell crater. On some basic human level, this is the story of an overshadowed daughter trying to understand her distant father. (One of several memorable choices of framing: when Erika and Klaus are having their late-night, cross-continental heart-to-heart in that prologue, Thomas is working unseen in an adjacent room, behind a closed door.) Zischler, a dead ringer for the real Mann, suggests a recognisably German man of letters: brisk and businesslike to the point of seeming dismissive, insistent on moving forwards and rejecting the cold comforts of the past, he clings to a utopian worldview, dating back to his beloved Goethe, which is tempered only slightly by recent world events. (Mann is one thing; Man entirely another.) He's a statue waiting to happen, pointing in a radically different direction to Hitler (with a necessarily lowered arm); the tragedy rearing up before Erika is that she can see her father becoming enmarbled before her very eyes, encapsulating the ideas the New Germany is desperately looking for while also depriving her of a parent at the moment she most needs one. If it's unexpected to encounter a film about Thomas Mann in 2026, it's doubly unexpected to encounter a 2026 film that has been composed with such evident care and intelligence, an art movie with appreciable art. To the deathly certainties of fascism, Pawlikowski retorts with nuance, (literal) grey areas and an embrace of all that might otherwise be considered contradictory. It's certainly rare to see a film that is so mournfully beautiful and yet so full of life, so rich with big, urgent ideas. And the economy that Pawlikowski arrives at with his editor Piotr Wojcik is inspired: if we're left wanting more as the credits roll, that's an acknowledgement there was still a lot more hard work to be done to get Germany and these relationships back on their feet. In this context, you had to take your victories - and your happy endings - where you could. Fatherland is so au fait with high culture it can use Bach (albeit one of the more recognisable Bachs) as a punchline-cum-payoff; at last, we witness a minor-key reunification, a fragile but hopeful communion between generations and between the living and the dead.

Fatherland is now showing in selected cinemas.

For a few crores more: "Jailer 2"

As we join Jailer 2, the sequel to 2023's biggest Tamil hit, the illegal trade in religious icons exposed in the course of film one continues apace, although its more inventive heavies have adjusted their preferred torture methods: bubbling vats of acid have now been replaced by burying snitches and flunkies alive in underground tunnels. Superstar Rajinikanth - as the former jailer Pandian - is still pursuing restorative justice by any means necessary, albeit from the lowly perspective of a supermarket shelfstacker, an alias he's assumed in order to protect himself and his family from vengeful pursuers; the character is reintroduced here halting a potential shoplifter with the aid of an umbrella and a laundry basket. And writer-director Nelson is back behind the camera, still constitutionally unable to set up anything other than an interesting shot. Elsewhere, however, change is in the air. The first Jailer began as dadsploitation pulp, before taking a sharp left turn into Elmore Leonard territory; Jailer 2 flips that trajectory on its head. For the first half here, we're watching a shaggy dog story with criminal elements, a means of connecting the dots between a major pan-Indian hit and a future third instalment, all undertaken by creatives who've relaxed to some extent, safe in the knowledge there is an audience out there who will happily pay to see this star and this director cook. The second shift concerns Pandian's status. No longer a showboating underworld player, he is, for much of Jailer 2, a mere cog in the machine, a khaki-clad everyman trying his best to go unnoticed while remaining at the mercy of the plotting fates. After a dust-up with a municipalities officer over his village's cloudy water supply, Pandian finds himself enlisted into a risky form of community service, becoming the driver for an inept fruiterer with criminal aspirations. One of Jailer 2's subtlest (and funniest) running jokes - the one you feel Leonard would have most enjoyed - is its insinuation that Kerala's underworld is composed of such blustering idiots that practically anybody might rise to the top with the right level of firepower at hand. (It is, at the very least, an irreverent counterposition to the might-makes-right obsessions of the two Dhurandhars.)

The downside of this approach is that the dramatic stakes feel palpably lower this time around; we're getting a lot more posturing and playacting than actual threat. The plot initially bears some faint resemblance to one of the strongest recent South hits, last year's thriller Thudarum, where superstar Mohanlal - himself on Everyman duty - was pressganged into playing chauffeur for a cabal of corrupt cops. (Rajni and Nelson appear to acknowledge some connection in handing Mohanlal a glorified walk-on in a quite dreadful Barry Gibb hairpiece.) It's a similar set-up played for a grab bag of shits and giggles; the upside is that, for a long time, the giggles are frequent and pretty big. Nelson is one of the few working Indian filmmakers who can knock a laugh out of you just from some felicity of framing: some artful business that misdirects us into believing Pandian has actually killed that municipalities officer with a spade, multiple nods to the decapitation that proved such a crowdpleaser first time around. I'd go even further and suggest that Nelson may be the one young Indian filmmaker who's troubled to study the films of the great Sergio Leone. What he appears to have taken away from the latter's work is the realisation that if a film is going to lead us around the houses for the better part of three hours, a director has to ensure a steady supply of rich and varied scenery; and furthermore, if we're being led astray by violent men, the violence has to be striking (if not necessarily deeply affecting). That last lesson is visible almost everywhere you look in Jailer 2's exceptionally enjoyable first half: in a standoff at a roadside tea house - a textbook Leone location - where the tension in this premise finally starts to build, in a makeshift whip circle designed to lash the Jailer's true identity out of his new associates, and in the punchline to "Ala Bolelo", the year's best staged musical number, a South Indian equivalent to that Romain Gavras/Yung Lean promo that European folks have spent the last six months going crazy about.

I sort of wish Jailer 2 had stayed in this Leone zone, which feels like this franchise's sweetest spot. Instead, the usual mass movie ADHD kicks in, a couple of scenes either side of the intermission so comprehensively clearing the chessboard that the second half effectively begins anew: now we're watching Pandian tangling with S.J. Suryah and a tatted-and-bobbed Vidya Balan as power-hungry siblings maintaining the statue trade from a cave beneath their lavish Goan wellness spa. You could, I suppose, embrace this offer of two Jailer sequels for the price of one ticket, but pitching our hero into the worlds of Succession and The White Lotus seems small fry and afterthought-y having witnessed Rajni stride so coolly and casually into the world of Once Upon a Time in the West. (Everything suddenly seems inferior: the Nora Fatehi number, "Bindaas", is colourfully composed and lively enough in other respects, but it can't hold a candle to "Ala Bolelo".) Nelson, bless him, is still coming up with moments that pop: a ridiculous bit involving a zipwire and an electric wheelchair, a clever bait-and-switch with a concealed listening device, an unexpected guest star ploughing a souped-up hotrod through the middle of a police station. Yet with the ensemble retreating into the background - if not being bumped offscreen altogether - the second half reverts to the untouchable, indomitable hero worship of the first movie, and to the sort of storytelling a twelve-year-old boy would make up for their favourite actor. And then the girls in bikinis storm in carrying swords... And then there's a bomb in the wheelchair... And then a sports car speeds head first into a moving plane... And then Rajni puts his glasses back on, lights up a big cigar and walks towards the camera, while an even bigger explosion goes off behind him. Cut, scene, wrap, onto Jailer 3 for those who've survived the carnage. In the end, it turns out there are some snafus even the Jailer can't resolve: the mass cinema's fondness for Illustrious Corpses-style screenwriting, the clashes in key actors' schedules. But - my God - why can't more sequels be this restlessly inventive, and be this interesting just to look at?

Jailer 2 is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

In memoriam: Tom Skerritt (Telegraph 23/10/26)

Tom Skerritt, who has died aged 93, was a lined and lived-in supporting actor who became a familiar face in the American cinema in the closing years of the 20th century, first as the doomed Dallas in Alien (1979), later as variably stern fathers and authority figures.

He broke through under the irreverent aegis of the New Hollywood, making an early impression as the surgeon Duke Forrest in Robert Altman’s Korean War romp M*A*S*H (1970), billed third behind – and delighting in bickering with – Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould: “We were all enjoying ourselves in a way that I told them, a couple of weeks before we finished shooting, ‘We’re never going to have the time we’re having now ever again.’”

Naively, Skerritt turned down a role in the film’s wildly successful TV spin-off, saying he didn’t think the project would work in half-hour form, but Altman remained loyal, casting the actor as Shelley Duvall’s mechanic father in his fugitive drama Thieves Like Us (1974). “I don’t think I’d be in the business if it wasn’t for [Altman],” Skerritt later mused. “He was teaching me stuff that I understood was significantly unlike most of the preconceived notions I had. He was not a Hollywood guy.”

More cult movies followed. In Hal Ashby’s intergenerational romance Harold and Maude (1971), Skerritt played a motorcycle cop, billed under the pseudonym “M. Borman”; in Big Bad Mama (1974), a drive-in knockoff of Bonnie and Clyde (1967), he was Fred Diller, the stick-up man in a love triangle with Angie Dickinson and William Shatner; and in stoner favourite Up in Smoke (1978), he was Cheech Marin’s shaggy pothead cousin Strawberry (“He’s always got the best smoke”).

For Skerritt, already in his mid-forties, such gigs were just work: “I had kids to support. I had to make a living.” But he took a step forward towards the end of the decade, appearing in Herbert Ross’s ballet drama The Turning Point (1977) as Shirley Maclaine’s husband, a retired dancer. The reviews were glowing (Variety raved “the ensemble is an absolute triumph”); more importantly for Skerritt’s visibility within the industry, the film earned eleven Oscar nominations.

Critical approval was one thing; commercial bankability another. The latter followed with Alien, although Skerritt initially turned down the role of Dallas, unimpressed by the script and the lowish budget. It took several rewrites and the studio hiring Ridley Scott to persuade the actor; his reward was top billing over Sigourney Weaver. That Dallas was the third character to be picked off by the Xenomorph came as some relief, Skerritt confessed, given the bulky spacesuits and 37-degree heat on set.

Skerritt’s presence in this runaway hit led to prominent roles over the next decade: Sheriff Bannerman, tracking a serial killer in David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dead Zone (1983); Viper, the flight instructor managing Tom Cruise’s cockiness in Top Gun (1986), a part for which Skerritt drew on his spell in the actual Air Force; Kirstie Alley’s former boss (and secret crush) on Cheers (1987-88); and Sally Field’s husband Drum Eatenton in the Ross-directed Steel Magnolias (1989).

By now, Skerritt was squarely middle-aged, much in demand, and often cast as conservative minded father figures: the married dad sent into a froth by his daughter’s wild child pal Drew Barrymore in erotic thriller Poison Ivy (1992), the upstanding Reverend Maclean in Robert Redford’s handsome A River Runs Through It (1992), the Mayor of Seattle in Cameron Crowe’s grunge-scene study Singles (1992).

Yet he put his film career on hold for several years to return to television, signing on to play Jimmy Brock, foursquare sheriff of an eccentric Wisconsin town in the David E. Kelley-created CBS comedy Picket Fences (1992-96), a major US ratings hit for which Skerritt would be twice Golden Globe-nominated and eventually win an Emmy in 1993.

It wasn’t just the awards; this was steady work, more reliable for an actor than the ever-fluctuating film business. “I have never really capitalised effectively on the successful films I have appeared in," Skerritt once reflected. "And I have been in some pretty damn good films. What it comes down to is what someone told me years ago – if you have one hit and the next two are not successful, then you have to start from scratch again. That’s what happened to me. It’s like a game, I suppose, and I’ve been doing OK.”

Thomas Roy Skerritt was born August 25, 1933, the youngest of three children to Detroit businessman Roy Skerritt and his wife Helen. He studied at Mackenzie High School, where he credited a trip to the nearby Detroit Institute of Art with firing his creative imagination: “Rodin’s sculpture The Thinker is out front of that, and I remember looking up at that – maybe I’m seven, eight, nine – and saying, ‘Okay: naked guy sitting on a toilet without the sports section. I’ve got nothing to read.’”

Upon graduating, he served four years in the USAF as a comms specialist before studying at Wayne State University and then UCLA, where a studio talent scout spotted him performing in a production of Richard Nash’s play The Rainmaker. He made his film debut in the Korean War drama War Hunt (1962), as part of an illustrious platoon that also included the young Robert Redford, John Saxon, Sydney Pollack and future Love Boat captain Gavin MacLeod. (Francis Ford Coppola had a cameo as a truck driver.)

Skerritt spent much of the next decade plying his trade in television, making appearances on The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (in 1963), Wagon Train (in 1964), My Favourite Martian (in 1964), The Fugitive (1965-66), Mannix (in 1967) and Hawaii Five-O (in 1970). He became a dependable, unshowy, thus recyclable go-to for small-screen casting directors, playing two separate roles on Bonanza (in 1964 and 1973) and five different roles on Gunsmoke (between 1965 and 1972).

He would return to TV in the 21st century, but newly greying and distinguished, often playing characters with some official title or real-world precedent: Joe Kennedy in the miniseries Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis (2000), the hawkish General Westmoreland in John Frankenheimer’s HBO film Path to War (2002), conservative Democrat Senator Chris Carrick on The West Wing (in 2003), the CIA’s Deputy Director in the BBC-Fox coproduction The Grid (2004) and President Stanfield in The Trojan Horse (2008), which envisioned Canada being co-opted by the US.

There were fewer movies, although Skerritt was the right level of famous to earn passing mention in Seth MacFarlane’s foul-mouthed Ted (2012) as a middle manager’s role model; in person, he gave Alien co-star Harry Dean Stanton the fondest of send-offs with Lucky (2017), before earning good reviews for the indie East of the Mountains (2021), playing a surgeon with cancer returning home to die. “With a lesser actor, East of the Mountains could have come across as tedious or maudlin,” wrote The Hollywood Reporter. “Instead, Skerritt delivers a performance of such understated eloquence and dignity that it emerges as a quiet gem.”

He briefly turned his hand to direction, overseeing episodes of Danger Bay in 1986 and Picket Fences between 1994 and 1996; his only feature credit was the TV movie Divided by Hate (1997), about a white supremacist cult. He settled in Seattle, appearing there as the title character in a 2012 ballet adaptation of Don Quixote and launching the EVRGRN social-media channel to support local creative talent.

In 2012, Skerritt and former Army captain Evan Bailey founded the Red Badge Project to encourage veterans with PTSD to share their stories; another abiding interest, conservation, extended to fronting Reflections of the River (2025), a limited webseries inspired by the actor’s experiences filming A River Runs Through It.

In interviews, he remained shruggingly self-effacing and ever-grateful for the opportunities, attributing his achievements to “concentration and luck”: “There are many prominent people in this business who choose certain types of pictures and play a derivation of a certain character they always play so they are immediately identifiable – and they are commercially successful because of it. I have never pursued that. I just do films that I would pay five bucks to see.”

He is survived by his third wife, Julie Tokashiki, whom he married in 1998, and five children: one with Tokashiki, three by his first wife Charlotte Shanks, and one by his second wife Sue Ellen Oran.

Tom Skerritt, born August 25, 1933, died October 21, 2026.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of October 16-18, 2026):

1 (new) Street Fighter (12A)

2 (new) Forgotten Island (PG) **

3 (new) Jailer 2 (15) ***

4 (2) Verity (15)

5 (1) Other Mommy (15)

6 (new) Hadestown: the Musical (PG)

7 (new) Whalefall (15) **

8 (3) Heart of the Beast (12A) ***

9 (4) Resident Evil (15)

10 (6) Sense and Sensibility (U)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Fatherland

2. Scream

3. Wildwood

4. Ghosts: The Possession of Button House

5. Jailer 2 

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Spider-Man: Brand New Day (12) ***

2 (new) Practical Magic 2 (12)

3 (re) Evil Dead Burn (18)

4 (new) Rise of the Footsoldier: Retribution (15)

5 (3) Paw Patrol: The Dino Movie (U)

6 (4) Minions & Monsters (U)

7 (14) Moana [2026] (PG)

8 (13) Obsession (18) *

9 (7) Disclosure Day (12) **

10 (2) Toy Story 5 (PG) **

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. The Secret Agent

2. The Invite

3. Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft

4. Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie

5. Power Ballad

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Carrie (Friday, BBC Two, 10pm)

2. Petite Maman (Saturday, Channel 4, 4.45am)

3. Grease [above] (Sunday, ITV1, 4pm)

4. Sisu (Saturday, Channel 4, 11.25pm)

5. Ready or Not (Tuesday, Channel 4, 2.50am)

In memoriam: Nana Patekar (Guardian 22/10/26)

The Indian actor Nana Patekar, who has died of a heart attack aged 75, first broke through in Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay! (1988), and the Bollywood hits Parinda (1989) and Krantiveer (1994). These early credits established Patekar as a performer of rare versatility: he and Irrfan Khan remain the only performers to have won Filmfare’s best actor, best supporting actor and best villain awards. Yet the question of whether Patekar was better suited to heroism or villainy lingered: allegations of sexual harassment and intimidation made by his former co-star Tanushree Dutta in 2018 kickstarted India’s #MeToo movement.

Until that point, the actor's rougher edges had mostly been cheered and celebrated. As an actor, Patekar demonstrated a baggy-eyed naturalism that spoke more to Bombay streetlife than Bollywood fantasy; given to writing out his dialogue until he had internalised it, his growling line readings were both idiosyncratic and much imitated. Satyajit Ray counted among the actor’s most illustrious admirers, but could not find a suitable project for him; Patekar instead had Nair to thank for launching him to international prominence in Salaam Bombay! as Baba Golub, the brutal pimp and drug dealer lording over an army of street children. Even here, though, harsh reality poked through: during shooting, Patekar was accidentally stabbed in the stomach by a young co-star who had disregarded Nair’s instructions.

Yet the Bollywood studios also made good use of his grouchy grit. He was commanding as the kingpin Anna in Parinda, Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s inventive relocation of On the Waterfront, for which he won two best supporting actor awards; he was appointed an honorary captain in the Indian Territorial Army after undergoing three years of training for Prahaar: The Final Attack (1991), a film he also ended up directing. He crossed paths with the emergent megastar Shah Rukh Khan in Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman (1992) and was momentarily in the running for Subhash Ghai’s blockbuster Khalnayak (1993), losing out to Sanjay Dutt.

Relations between Patekar and Dutt deteriorated further after the latter was linked to the 1993 Bombay bus bombings in which Patekar’s brother was killed. (Patekar’s wife, the Marathi actor Neelakanti, was also due to board one of the targeted vehicles.) Even after Dutt’s comeback, Patekar remained defiant: “I have not worked with [Dutt] in 22 years of my career. I will not work with him in the future.” A comparable rage powered Krantiveer, where he played a dissolute gambler reviving his fortunes via social activism. Heart problems meant he shot his final scenes with a doctor on standby; while distributors thought Patekar a commercial risk, the film struck a chord, becoming the third biggest Hindi hit of 1994.

Born Vishwanath Patekar in Murud-Janjira, Maharashtra, Nana was one of the three sons of Dinkar Patekar, a textile painter and businessman, and his wife, Nirmala. He attended Samarth Vidyalaya and the Bandra School of Arts in Mumbai, supporting his family after his father's business collapsed by painting zebra crossings and cinema posters: "I had to come from school at 1.30pm, eat something, walk eight kilometres there and eight kilometres back." He went on to study commercial art at the Sir JJ Institute of Art, where he also joined the drama society.

After graduation, he briefly worked as a police sketch artist before joining the acclaimed Marathi theatre group Rangayan. Switched on to films by his friend, the renowned Indian actor Smita Patil (“I was happy doing theatre, but she insisted”), he made his screen debut in Patil's 1978 social drama Gaman, about a rural migrant trying to establish himself in the big city. (Patil also taught Patekar to drive.) A string of supporting roles followed; two years before Salaam Bombay!, he played Gandhi’s assassin Nathuram Godse in the Emmy-winning TV miniseries Lord Mountbatten: The Last Viceroy.

Despite his success with Krantiveer, for which he won several best actor awards, Patekar was not always the easiest fit with the studio system. He was replaced on Raja (1995) after spending two days hectoring his co-stars Madhuri Dixit and Mukesh Khanna with acting notes. (Upon being replaced by Paresh Rawal, he returned his fee to the producers.) And he paused his career during the Kargil war of 1999 to re-enlist, this time with the Maratha Light Infantry, serving 60 days in Srinigar, Dras and Leh; he lost 20kg in the process, while earning a promotion to the rank of major.

Back on civvy street, he landed a signature role as Inspector Sadhu, the dirty cop who becomes the hero of Ab Tak Chhappan (2004), and swept India's Best Villain prizes as the underworld don Tabrez Alam in Prakash Jha's Aparahan (2005), then switched into a lighter mode for the knockabout comedies Welcome (2007) and Welcome Back (2015). Elder statesman status beckoned: he played Mumbai’s police commissioner in Ram Gopal Varma’s The Attacks of 26/11 (2013), voiced Shere Khan in the Hindi dub of Disney’s The Jungle Book (2016) and enjoyed a major success with the Marathi film Natsamrat (2016), playing an acclaimed actor unravelling in retirement. He was awarded the Padma Shri and the Raj Kapoor special contribution award in 2013; in 2015, he set up the NAAM Foundation with fellow actor Makarand Anaspure to help drought-hit farmers. 

Then came Dutta’s 2018 interview with The Hindu, where she repeated an earlier accusation that Patekar had first sexually harassed her while shooting a dance sequence for the unreleased Horn ‘OK’ Pleassss (2009), then sent hired thugs her way after she fled the set; the thugs surrounded Dutta's car, smashing the windscreen and trapping her inside. (The journalist Janice Sequeira, who witnessed the attack, verified Dutta’s account.) Patekar denied the allegations. The Mumbai police opened an investigation; while no formal charges were brought, the incident sparked renewed concern about the treatment of women in Bollywood.

After a spell in industry purdah, Patekar recently attempted a comeback of sorts. There were supporting roles in the propagandistic The Vaccine War (2023), limp comedy Housefull 5 (2025) and the streaming-bound Subedaar (2026), though the actor also lent a wry centre to Vishal Bhardwaj’s Shakespeare riff O’ Romeo (2026), advising caution as the handler to Shahid Kapoor's wayward hitman.

 
He married Neelakanti in 1978, and they had two sons; the first, Durvasa, died in 1980, aged two. Patekar is survived by his wife and his second son, Malhar.

 
Nana Patekar, actor and director, born January 1, 1951, died October 8, 2026.