A shuffling, broken down Samuel L Jackson is quite a sight. In The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey (AppleTV+), he plays the eponymous Grey, a man suffering from rapidly progressing dementia, living in hermitic squalor despite the best efforts of his loving great-nephew Reggie (Omar Benson Miller), who is a last, fragile link with the outside world until he is killed in an unsolved shooting.
And yet he holds your attention as firmly as he ever did as the biblically monologuing Jules in Pulp Fiction, or as Nick Fury in the MCU or – of course – as FBI agent Neville Flynn trying to keep track of all those snakes on that plane in 2006’s enduring masterpiece Snakes on a Plane. In his moments of lucidity Ptolemy is frightened of the ever changing world. In the rest he is distraught, burdened by unknown horrors and haunted by people and fragmented scenes from his childhood in the Jim Crow south. It is a rounded and unsparing portrait of dementia and to see the 73-year-old actor offer up such a vulnerable performance after a career largely built on dazzling us with the opposite adds a poignancy all of its own.
