Monkey Barrel, Edinburgh
The 2023 best newcomer winner rebuts her ‘mild’ reputation with choice quips and boyband erotica

On her first visit to the fringe, Urooj Ashfaq left as the surprise winner of the best newcomer award . Now she returns, to rebut a descriptor widely applied to that 2023 debut – specifically, that her comedy is mild and lacks edge. You want edge, she asks in How to Be a Baddie? I’ll give you edge! And so the show does, to a degree – if not a degree high enough to cancel out the 29-year-old’s unshakeable amiability and charm.

In part, she explains, the confusion was a cultural one: back home in India, there’s nothing conservative (to use one of her critics’ mots injustes ) about Ashfaq. She’s a standup, for a start, in a country where that attracts not, ahem, intelligent reviews like this one, but vigilante attention and online insults. Ashfaq has a choice quip in response to one such, and another explaining why she’s off-putting to both Hindu and Muslim men.

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In this week’s newsletter: Once notorious for testing audience endurance, ​modern blockbusters seem to be trimming the fat​, ​from superhero sagas ​t​o comedic classics

Walking out of a 6.30pm showing of The Naked Gun a couple of weeks ago I was greeted by an unfamiliar sight: daylight. Had I gone to see the film in the upper reaches of the northern hemisphere, where daylight is near-permanent in the summer months? No I was in Leicester Square – a different kind of barren wasteland than the Arctic tundra – and there was another reason for the brightness: The Naked Gun was only 1hr 25m long.

Very few modern films – aside from those of the child-friendly variety – clock in at less than 90 minutes, but even so The Naked Gun doesn’t feel a total outlier. In fact, of the last three blockbusters I’ve seen at the cinema, only one – Superman – went beyond the two hour mark, and only by 10 minutes. The other, The Fantastic Four: First Steps, was 1hr 54m, relatively svelte for a 21st-century superhero movie. Granted, earlier in this summer we had Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning, clocking in at a Brobdingnagian 2hr 49m (and boy, at times did it feel it), but looking back now, that almost feels a relic from and earlier, more indulgent time.

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Traverse, Edinburgh
Sibling envy, a stumbling acting career and addiction are covered in an indistinctive show by the sister of Carl

There are many urgent topics demanding our attention on the fringe. Having a famous brother is not high among them. Yet that, initially at least, is the primary hang-up of Lucie Barât.

Many of us would be delighted to see our siblings prosper, but she was too preoccupied with her own bumpy career to be anything but envious when her kid brother hit the big time. He is Carl Barât of the Libertines, who seemed to go overnight from borrowing her guitar to being a music-paper darling.

At the Traverse, Edinburgh , until 24 August

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After my dad died, my mum and I endured the coercive control of her new partner for years. It was The Way Way Back that freed us both

In the first five minutes of the 2013 comedy drama The Way Way Back, a teenage boy has a conversation with his stepfather in a car bound for Cape Cod. You can only see the stepdad’s eyes in the rearview mirror, but you instantly know it’s Steve Carell. At this point, I loved Carell. He’s the reason that I, then a teenager, watched the film.

“Duncan … let me ask you something,” Carell’s character says. “On a scale of one to 10, what do you think you are?” Duncan responds shyly that he thinks he’s a six. Any normal adult would balk and correct him. Tell him he’s nothing less than a 10. “I think you’re a three,” says Carell’s character, Trent. Suddenly, I hated Carell with a blind fury. He was a vision of pure evil. I didn’t want to watch him in anything else, ever.

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Saved Treasures of Gaza aims to preserve territory’s historical identity against backdrop of war and famine

An exhibition tracing more than 5,000 years of cultural and archaeological history in Gaza has become a summer hit in Paris, as visitors flock to discover the heritage of this strip of land along the Mediterranean, whose multilayered past has been eclipsed by modern tragedy.

While Gaza faces a humanitarian catastrophe of starvation and war , the exhibition, Saved Treasures of Gaza , at Paris’s Institut du Monde Arabe brings what curators called a sense of “urgency” to explain the rich history of a place that has been a crossroads of cultures since Neolithic times.

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The most cinematic evil creature ever comes to the small screen, courtesy of the brains behind the excellent revamp of Fargo. It’s a dread-packed, gory watch that’s hugely entertaining

‘I am human, and nothing human is alien to me,” wrote Roman playwright Terence in 165BC. He hadn’t seen any of the Alien films, though. He hadn’t seen Alien or Aliens or Alien 3 , he hadn’t seen any of the Predator crossover canon , he hadn’t seen Resurrection or Prometheus or the one after Prometheus. He hadn’t even seen Alien: Romulus , even though it’s named after the guy who co-founded Rome. The Oscar-winning franchise has earned well over a billion dollars worldwide. There’s nothing more human than loving Alien.

Part of the franchise’s success is its malleability. A creature-horror stuffed with Freudian nightmare, the films blend action, sci-fi, theology and satire. (I don’t want to be Frankenstein’s Pedant about it, but the monster is the profit-driven corporation determined to bring the alien to Earth to develop as a biological weapon.) Now that the IP belongs to Disney, we should expect many more instalments. But can they keep stretching the story into exciting shapes? Or are the days of Alien: Below Decks or The Real Housewives of Moon LV-426 upon us?

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A new case to be cracked in hit drama Beck. Plus: the wild wigs in The Count of Monte Cristo need to be seen to be believed. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, BBC Four

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There’s more intergenerational larks in a sprightly body-swap sequel, and the Floridian dream-pop singer-songwriter is back with a new album of dark, skewed Americana

Freakier Friday
Out now
More than 20 years ago, Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan starred in what was already the third big-screen incarnation of the novel by Mary Rodgers. The premise of a mother swapping bodies with her daughter clearly has staying power, with Curtis and Lohan back to reprise their roles in this sequel.

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Jenna Ortega returns with the second season of the hit comedy, while Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan reunite in the zany body-swap sequel. Here’s the pick of the week’s culture, taken from the Guardian’s best-rated reviews

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