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

All 1160 Articles

David Brent: Life on the Road review: Ricky Gervais plays his excruciating old hits one more time

August 18, 2016

Ricky Gervais may have captured the zeitgeist with The Office, but he’s reminded us often enough in the 13 years since it finished that it’s a bar he’s not always capable of hitting. This movie spin-off shows he can still play those toe-curling greatest hits, even if his film isn’t exactly brimming with new ideas. [...]
Groundhog Day at the Old Vic review: Tim Minchin’s follow-up to Matilda is a bawdy, hilarious modern-day Dickens tale

August 18, 2016

At the opening of Groundhog Day I overheard David Walliams say to writer Tim Minchin: “This better be bloody good.” He was saying what everyone was thinking: there’s an absurd amount of expectation heaped on Minchin’s first musical since 2010’s Matilda, a level of hype perhaps not seen since The Book of Mormon. So it’s just as [...]
Why Mallorca is up there with Tuscany as one of Europe’s top retreats

August 15, 2016

In the first half of the 20th century, Mallorca was a relatively poor island, its inhabitants eking out a largely pastoral existence. But the Balearics, which include Mallorca, Minorca, Ibiza and Formentera, boast some of the most stunning scenery in the world, especially the former, by far the biggest of the four main islands, which [...]
No Man’s Sky review: Can this indie space explorer live up to its own galaxy-sized hype?

August 10, 2016

No Man's Sky gives real thought to what it would be like to be marooned on an alien planet. What would it look like? How would it feel? British indie developer Hello Games has created an algorithm-based universe containing a mind-boggling number of planets to explore, far more than will ever be seen by human [...]
Nerve film review: Emma Roberts and Dave Franco star in YA thriller about what happens when Pokemon Go turns evil

August 9, 2016

Nerve is a savvy internet morality tale tacked on to a giddy teen blockbuster, a parable about the corrosive power of online anonymity and the dangerous side-effects of a generation addicted to the dopamine rush of “likes”. It’s the first original feature from Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman since 2010’s massaged-reality documentary Catfish (they also [...]
Young Chekhov at National Theatre review: this triple bill of Platonov, Ivanov and The Seagull gives fresh perspective on one of the great dramatists

August 5, 2016

Chekhov has a reputation as a miserabilist, due in large part to his recurring themes of suicide and existential dread. But this does a disservice to the comedy that runs through his work – and thank goodness it does, because if his plays were as gloomy as people tend to think, eight hours of them [...]
Suicide Squad movie review: Jared Leto’s strong Joker game can’t save a film that’s too fixated on Margot Robbie’s behind

August 2, 2016

There are lots of reasons to dislike Suicide Squad. It shamelessly fetishises guns, for instance, which in the current climate feels pretty distasteful. There are guns emblazoned with “love” and “hate”, guns made out of gold, guns that fly through the air in slow motion. It shamelessly objectifies women, particularly Margot Robbie and more particularly [...]
St Emilion wine has a chequered reputation but I’m discovering it can be worth a little TLC

August 2, 2016

Sometime later this summer, when I have ploughed my way through another 100 pages of paperwork and weaved through a bewildering slalom of French bureaucracy, I will have realised a dream. I am buying a house in Bordeaux, a few miles from St Emilion. It sits in a small hamlet in Entre-Deux-Mers, surrounded by well-tended [...]
The Plough and the Stars at National Theatre’s Lyttelton: an emotional haymaker about the 1916 Easter Rising

July 28, 2016

There’s a tried and tested formula to Sean O’Casey’s 1926 play The Plough and the Stars: he makes us care for his cast of quick-talking, hard-drinking Irish men and women, and then he makes us watch as their lives fall irrevocably apart. The sense of inevitability doesn’t make it any easier. The play caused riots [...]
Jason Bourne review: Matt Damon returns to the Paul Greengrass-directed franchise, but finds himself in surprisingly shallow waters

July 27, 2016

Paul Greengrass returns to direct this fourth instalment of the Bourne franchise, with a plot cobbled thinly together from the previous three. Bourne (Matt Damon) is brought back from the cold when villainous Agency head honcho Robert Dewey (Tommy Lee Jones) starts a covert intelligence program – Ironhand – operating beyond the radar of the [...]

Starmer took sport freebies worth tens of thousands of pounds while PM

Starmer took sport freebies worth tens of thousands of pounds while PM

The PlayStation Portal 2026 review: Japanese innovation, hampered by UK infrastructure

By: Steve Dinneen

All 1160 Articles

Subscribe