Sure, the xenomorph is an all-time great screen baddie – but it’s no match for the eyeball-octopus parasite stuffed in a sheep’s head

From the moment it was announced, Alien: Earth was a bold punt. Ridley Scott’s movie (and James Cameron’s first sequel) painted the xenomorph as a classic baddie. It was unstoppable. It was seemingly unkillable. It was largely seen in flashes, and motivated only by death. Whenever subsequent movies attempted to broaden the alien’s mythology, its impact only diluted. So the thought of subjecting it to an entire television series – one designed to run for several years, no less – risked destroying it completely.

And yet Alien: Earth is a wild success. But this isn’t really to do with the xenomorph at all. Instead, almost every last atom of glory has been stolen by a new alien; one whose smarts, menace and weirdness trump almost anything the franchise has given us so far. Yes, it’s time to give the demon sheep eye its props.

Exhibition by African American artist to focus on architecture, art under fascism and her own links to the UK

The Royal Academy will in 2027 host the first major UK exhibition by Simone Leigh, four years after she became the first African American woman to represent the US at the Venice Biennale .

Leigh told the Guardian she would bring a series of new “monumental work” to London in September 2027, focusing on themes including architecture, art made under fascism and her own connection – via her Jamaican heritage – to the UK.

“I’ve been thinking about American history a lot in the development of these works because we’re now living under full-on fascism here,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about the kind of art that’s made under fascism.”

The standup on Taskmaster, her time in the Cambridge Footlights and the geniuses behind Colin the Caterpillar

What made you get into comedy?
In primary school I wasn’t very cool. I never got Hula Hoops in my packed lunches because my Polish mum would give me cucumbers and I hadn’t seen High School Musical because we didn’t have Sky. Without those two major assets, you had to find a “thing” and mine became trying to make people laugh. I made a YouTube channel when I was 14, then eventually worked at the Edinburgh fringe when I was 18, and saw some amazing standup. I also saw some really bad standup. I thought: well, I can definitely do that!

What’s been one of your all-time favourite gigs?
I did one where the average age of the audience was over 70. I decided to do some material about a vibrator and they absolutely loved it. A 92-year-old gave me some tips on the different settings.

Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, Bradford
There are calls for peace, intimations of violence, Korean folklore and spiralling vortices: everyone has a spiel but one artist stands out

Intimations of war and the bill for a Brick Lane curry. Queer kisses, shamanistic gurgling, miles of VHS tape and lasers in the jungle. This year’s Turner prize exhibition opens this Saturday at Cartwright Hall in Bradford, the current UK city of culture.

A soundtrack of a 16th-century Lutheran hymn and peals of church bells create an unresolvable conflict with the small photographs trapped behind glass on a low shelf in Rene Matić ’s installation. The voices of Nina Simone and bell hooks are dragged from the ether, along with the chants of trans rights activists and commuters calling for a free Palestine. Rihanna sings Lift Me Up a cappella as I go from snapshot to snapshot, looking for the story amid the club scenes and marches, the street graffiti and a baby in a bath. Here’s an elderly man in hospital, then lipstick and cigarettes and a page from a remembrance book: “Dad, Our Hero, VIP, Legend” reads the dedication.

Playhouse, Edinburgh
The Monty Python man revisits his remarkable career, with songs dedicated to George Harrison and Robin Williams – and some ribbing of John Cleese

A career retrospective fondly remembering a previous career retrospective: who said pop will eat itself? I enjoyed Eric Idle ’s touring “one-man musical” very much: he seems like a thoroughly good egg, he’s led a remarkable entertainment life, and who’d begrudge him, now 82, the chance to bask in it – and his audience’s palpable affection – at least one more time? But even I found it a bit much when, reaching the end of this greatest hits compendium, Idle includes Monty Python’s 2014 O2 gigs in his pantheon of past glories. A show for nostalgists warmly recalling an earlier show for nostalgists? Welcome to entertainment in the age of the never-ending showbiz afterlife.

In fairness to Idle, this show (called – what else? – Always Look on the Bright Side of Life, Live!) is not about Python, it’s about him, from South Shields childhood via boarding school in the Midlands, all the way to the Hollywood Bowl. It follows the now familiar format, with our host narrating his life and works in story, lots of clips on an upstage screen – and in song. A certain self-centredness is unavoidable with such shows, but Idle offsets that better than most, dedicating a substantial slice of the evening – and two sentimental songs – to sorely missed friends George Harrison and Robin Williams.

At Pavilion theatre, Bournemouth , on 24 September and Royal Albert Hall, London , on 27 September

Disney saw hurricane-level blowback over the talkshow host’s suspension, thanks in large part to consumers

ABC says “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” will return to the airwaves next Tuesday – less than a week after Trump’s henchman Brendan Carr, chair of the Federal Communications Commission, said on a podcast that Kimmel’s remarks were part of a “concerted effort to lie to the American people”.

Carr threatened that the FCC could “do this the easy way or the hard way” – suggesting that either ABC and its parent company, Walt Disney, must remove Kimmel or the regulator would have “additional work” to do .

A band of roving, feral orphans – asymptomatic carriers of a plague that turns adults into cannibals – regret accepting a stranger’s act of apparent kindness

This low-budget horror thriller comes with an almighty directorial last name, but Steven’s daughter Destry serves up precious little that is classically Spielbergian in her debut feature. Forget Dad’s signature childlike wonder; the youngsters in this post-apocalyptic outing – ostracised because minors are asymptomatic carriers of a plague that turns adults into cannibals – are completely feral, opportunistic and worryingly keen to kill. Spielberg’s film is a surprisingly nihilistic, if uneven, splicing of 21st-century young-adult and 1970s exploitation flicks.

After making a break for the border, roving juvenile Mary (Zoe Colletti) takes up with a band of orphans squatting a nearby community centre. Leader Ben (Andrew Liner) is wounded during a botched armed robbery on a service station, so they take refuge in an isolated house. The unlikely owner is plummy, sardonic Brit Clara (Downton Abbey’s Michelle Dockery) – who stitches him up and deems that what these wastrels really need is a big plate of cookies. When the group wake up imprisoned in Clara’s attic, it should only reinforce rule number one: never eat the cookies.

Reservation Dogs creator Sterlin Harjo’s excellent crime caper has the actor on top form as a journalist taking down Tulsa’s bad guys

Ethan Hawke is hilariously raccoon-like in The Lowdown; not just because his hair is all scraggly grey-and-black, and usually in various states of disarray depending on whether his Lee Raybon is crawling out from the wrong side of the bed or the trunk of some neo-Nazi’s car.

A freelance journalist by trade (among other things), Lee is the self-appointed gumshoe in creator Sterlin Harjo’s deliciously pulpy and deceptively lighthearted noir caper. He sniffs around Tulsa, Oklahoma, digs through people’s trash, repeatedly makes a mess of things and mostly gets hostile responses from the people who have the misfortune of crossing paths with him (pretty much the world a raccoon lives in). But, every so often, someone will find Lee adorable or sympathetic enough that they just might lend him a helping hand, or even take him to bed with them.

Turkey’s recycling centres treat vast amounts of the UK’s waste – and rely on refugees who work in conditions so unsafe that hundreds have died. A new podcast uncovers the sinister side of what happens when Brits throw things away

On his way to a remote industrial zone at the edge of Istanbul, Adnan Khan compares it to something out of Mad Max. Packs of wild dogs roam around desolate wastelands; toxic chemicals spill out into the street, with corrugated metal sheets and “slapdash factories” scattered around. “It’s like a shantytown,” he says.

However, once he sets foot inside some of these factories, he reaches for a different cinematic comparison. This time he’s thinking of the torture-horror film Saw , as he witnesses Afghan refugees working and living in conditions that he says fit the UN definition of modern-day slavery.