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, going out, art, technology and travel.

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Steve McQueen at Tate Modern review: Dramatic retrospective muses on what it means to be human

February 14, 2020

I’m not sure anybody has perfected the art of translating video installations into blockbuster gallery retrospectives, but the Tate Modern comes pretty darned close. Having Steve McQueen as your subject helps, of course. He’s the man with the Midas touch, a Turner-prize winning artist turned Oscar-winning director. The Tate collects pieces from after his 1999 [...]
Nora: A Doll’s House review: Elaborate reworking doesn’t do Ibsen’s classic justice

February 14, 2020

The works of Ibsen are perennial candidates for a thorough reimagining, his quietly devastating studies of class struggle and women’s rights depressingly relevant for each subsequent generation since he started writing in the mid-19th century. A 2018 production of The Wild Duck at the Almeida, for instance, featured actors speaking as “themselves” as it explored [...]
Death of England review: Rafe Spall dazzles in this timely portrait of the resurgent far-right

February 14, 2020

Rafe Spall asserts his credentials as one of the finest stage actors around in this percussive, often hilarious one-man play about working class racism. He plays Michael, an Essex flower-seller whose oily patter masks a vast well of toxic emotion. He’s the guy in the pub who’s all smiles until he’s kicking the life out [...]
Far Away review: Chilling Caryl Churchill drama staged in 45 minutes is a breath of fresh air

February 14, 2020

In our current theatrical landscape, where three-hour plays are the norm and two-part, seven-hour epics are the height of sophistication, there’s something thrilling, almost transgressive about the sentence “45 minutes, straight through”. Caryl Churchill’s 2000 play Far Away is a poster-child for short-form story telling, trimming every ounce of fat, wasting not a single word. [...]
Endgame at the Old Vic review: Samuel Beckett double bill is delightfully taxing

February 7, 2020

There was a club night in Glasgow in the early 2000s called Optimo, which occasionally used the slogan: “You won’t like it, sugar” (taken from the lyrics of a Whitehouse track that you really shouldn’t google). It always struck me as a brilliant bit of marketing, at once embracing and ridiculing musical elitism. I can [...]
Daniel Isn’t Real review: Arnie Jr stars in this neon horror mashup

February 7, 2020

‘Keep your friends close and your imaginary friends closer’ could be the tagline for this psycho-horror starring the handsome young progeny of Arnold Schwarzenegger. It follows introverted law student Luke, whose childhood-trauma coping-mechanism, an invisible pal called Daniel, reemerges with violent intent. While Daniel Isn’t Real’s budget is relatively meagre, it brings to mind an [...]
Parasite movie review: Bong Joon Ho’s surreal social commentary is a work of rare genius

February 7, 2020

Over the last 90 years, the Academy has deigned to nominate just 10 foreign language films for the Best Picture gong, with none of them walking away with the gold statue. There’s an 11th in the running this year: Bong Joon Ho’s superlative Parasite. The director, whose oeuvre spans both Korean- (The Host, Mother) and [...]
Uncle Vanya at the Harold Pinter Theatre review: Toby Jones delivers an acting masterclass

January 31, 2020

Just as Dickens charted the plight of the underclass in Victorian England, Chekhov chronicled the slow collapse of the Russian aristocracy at the end of the 19th century. In Ian Rickson’s production of Uncle Vanya, adapted by award-winning playwright Conor McPherson, this breakdown is made literal, with trees winding through broken windows and vertiginous bookcases [...]
The Lighthouse film review: Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe shine in this tale of madness at sea

January 31, 2020

From kids’ TV show Round the Twist to video game Bioshock, popular culture has painted lighthouses as, at best, weird and spooky, and at worst responsible for the complete collapse of society. Well guess what: it’s yet another bad day for the lighthouse marketing department. Robert Eggers follows up his brilliant 2016 period horror The [...]
Mushrooms: The Art, Design and Future of Fungi at Somerset House – A celebration of humanity’s great, unsung alliance

January 31, 2020

There’s something about mushrooms that’s at once fascinating and horrifying. I remember opening a cupboard in an old flat and discovering a little field of pure-white mushrooms sprouting out of the carpet. Part of me was amazed that these strange things had taken up residence in my home, and part of me wanted to burn [...]

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By: Steve Dinneen

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