By: Steve Dinneen

Life&Style Editor I'm the editor of City A.M. The Magazine, and editor of the daily newspaper's Life&Style section. We cover food, wine, going out, culture, technology and travel. I'm also the head judge of our Toast the City awards that celebrates hospitality in the Square Mile. Find me on X @steve_dinneen

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Robert De Niro in Dirty Grandpa, Paul Sorrentino’s Youth and Patricia Riggen’s The 33 reviewed

January 28, 2016

Dirty Grandpa 18 | Dir. Dan Mazer | ★★★☆☆ Robert De Niro plays a recently widowed army vet who tricks Zac Efron into driving him to Florida to chase young women. Who'd have thought that De Niro would spend the latter half of his career dropping N-bombs and making dick jokes? But while it's not [...]
Audi R8 supercar is up there with McLaren and Aston Martin

January 26, 2016

The plan was to fly to the South of France at 9am, then spend the rest of the day driving around the glorious Var region. But fog-related delays meant we didn’t arrive at Paul Ricard until darkness was setting in. The next morning there was rain of biblical proportions. That’s not the ideal way to [...]
Soulcycle, Insanity, CrossFit: Where do fitness fads and cults come from?

January 25, 2016

Cult workout regimes are big business, whether it's Insanity's Shaun Thomson raking in millions or the cult of CrossFit recruiting evangelical members across the globe. We take a look at where they started. Insanity The Insanity workout was founded when BeachBody, a Californian fitness company, started searching for a charismatic trainer and came across Shaun Thomson, [...]
The Big Short interview with director Adam McKay: “Outrage with banks comes naturally… they’re street hustlers”

January 22, 2016

The Oscar-nominated director of financial film The Big Short, Adam McKay, wasn't afraid of throwing the cat among the pigeons when I caught up with him yesterday. On the eve of his latest film's release he launched a stinging attack on Wall Street, branding bankers “street hustlers” and labelling the SEC’s response to the crisis “disgusting”. [...]
Darkhorse Stratford restaurant review: more nag than stallion

January 20, 2016

I'm calling January 2016 as the moment the restaurant template that's dominated London for the last five years finally jumped the shark. Far too many new openings appear to have been cobbled together, Inception-style, from my memories of other restaurants, from the interior design to the locally sourced, modern European menus. There's a cynicism to the uniformity. It's a formula that [...]
Oldroyd in Islington review: the ultimate local restaurant

December 22, 2015

344 Upper Street, N1, www.oldroydlondon.com FOOD ★★★★☆ | VALUE ★★★★★ | ATMOSPHERE ★★★★☆ Cost for two with booze: £85 Oldroyd may have been open a little while now, but what nicer way to end a nice year filled with nice meals than a trip to one of London’s very nicest restaurants. Not best, necessarily, but [...]
The Danish Girl movie review: Eddie Redmayne’s Oscar-bait performance fails to be as remarkable as the real-life story of Lili Elbe

December 18, 2015

Dir: Tom Hooper | ★★★☆☆ The Danish Girl could be described as a prestige picture. Featuring an awards-friendly performance by Eddie Redmayne, it’s a worthy, well-intentioned drama that tells an important story. The whole thing is tasteful in the extreme, providing us with a respectful, dignified portrait of a real-life person who deserves to be recognised. [...]
Evening at the Talk House at National Theatre review

December 18, 2015

National Theatre | ★★☆☆☆ Premiering this week at the National Theatre, Evening at the Talk House is a dissatisfying affair. Perhaps there was a warning in the title, which implies static, self-important blathering, but the opening monologue – twenty-minutes of a playwright-turned-screenwriter reflecting on the trajectory of his life – really sets the tone. Written by [...]
Rose English at Camden Arts Centre brings together the north east and the far east

December 18, 2015

Camden Arts Centre | ★★☆☆☆ Camden Arts Centre takes Rose English’s neat exploration of movement and fragility and spreads it incredibly thinly over two and a half rooms, resulting in a jumbled and at times baffling collection of sounds and objects. You enter into a blacked-out room to the sound of a grand 10-voice chamber [...]
Wonder.land at the National Theatre is a visual delight… but where are all the songs?

December 18, 2015

National Theatre | ★★★☆☆ Wonder.land takes as its starting point that the world inside our smartphones, with its cat memes and its gaudy virtual worlds, is as mad as a hatter. Mad as the Hatter, in fact. The Alice in this production doesn’t tumble into a literal rabbit-hole: she falls into the world of chatrooms and [...]

Why OpenAI and Anthropic are really fighting about ads

The real Guinness Six Nations showdown is happening in the pub

How South Wales became one of the UK’s most exciting food destinations

By: Steve Dinneen

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