Christopher Lawrence

Christopher Lawrence covers entertainment and culture for the Las Vegas Review-Journal with a critic’s eye, using reported guides and feature narratives to explain how new venues, attractions and media experiences fit together. He has been a professional TV critic since 2000, and serves as the Review-Journal’s TV critic and movie critic while also writing broader entertainment features and columns. His work spans immersive attractions, dining concepts, city history and cultural institutions, with an emphasis on what the experience feels like and how it is designed.

TV, movies and entertainment columns

Lawrence’s core training is as a screen critic, and that sensibility runs through his entertainment coverage. He has been a professional TV critic since 2000, the Review-Journal’s TV critic since 2005 and its movie critic since 2012, giving him a long view on how television and film trends evolve. Beyond individual reviews, he writes entertainment columns that pull together themes and highlights, including reflections on difficult years that still produced things worth celebrating on screen.

This background in criticism shapes his reported pieces, which tend to focus on structure, storytelling and tone rather than simply relaying promotional talking points.

Immersive attractions and offbeat experiences

A distinctive strand of Lawrence’s work is his coverage of immersive and offbeat attractions, where he treats each site as a complete experience rather than a novelty. His features include a Star Wars-inspired desert outpost retreat that covers 240 acres, presented as a “postapocalyptic sanctuary” where leaving the world - and the galaxy - behind is central to the design.

He also writes about the sauna-and-a-show spectacle known as Aufguss, detailing how the performance element and ritual combine to create a specific kind of visit. In his coverage of the Museum of Ice Cream, he walks through the installations, the atmosphere and what visitors can expect inside, using clear description and photos to make an unfamiliar, highly themed attraction legible.

Across these pieces, he emphasizes sensory detail, concept and flow, explaining what makes each experience distinct instead of listing amenities.

Food halls, dining and local businesses

Lawrence frequently turns his attention to food-driven entertainment, especially where dining concepts replace or reimagine traditional formats.

In “Bye-bye buffets: Your guide to Las Vegas food halls,” he offers a structured guide to multiple food halls, explaining where they are, what styles of food they feature and how they fit into the city’s changing approach to casual dining. His profile of Wicked Donuts chef-owner Robert Teddy focuses on Teddy’s second life as a professional Santa, blending the story of a local business with character details that show how a persona is built and maintained. These stories foreground operators and their design choices - from how stalls in a food hall are curated to how a doughnut shop becomes part of a holiday tradition - rather than focusing solely on menus or pricing.

City futures, history and institutions

Another pillar of Lawrence’s coverage is the way entertainment and design intersect with the city’s past and future. In “400-foot cowboy boots and 2 San Franciscos: The Strip that could’ve been,” he examines unrealized plans for massive themed projects, treating them as a lens on how the Strip might have developed under different priorities and tastes. His “historical, sometimes hysterical” look at the city’s past combines archival detail with humor, using specific episodes to show how spectacle has long been part of the local story.

In “26 things in ’26: What’s coming to Las Vegas in the new year,” he assembles a forward-looking list of projects and attractions, giving concise, factual summaries that help readers see the scale and direction of upcoming change. Through RJ Magazine features, he writes about efforts to bring a new art museum to life, repertory theaters marking milestones and movable festivals, consistently tying institutions and events back to their role in the broader cultural fabric.

He occasionally steps outside pure entertainment to look at operational questions, such as how casinos handled temperature screening of guests during the coronavirus pandemic, showing a capacity to report on policy and procedure when it directly shapes the visitor experience.

Format, tone and reporting style

Lawrence works across formats, from long-form magazine features to service guides and recurring columns, and he keeps the tone grounded even when subjects are playful. Service pieces such as food hall guides and new-year previews are organized around clear subtopics and practical detail, making it easy to understand what is new and why it matters.

Feature profiles and attraction stories lean on narrative and scene-setting, but they stay close to observable facts - the layout of a retreat, the rituals of a sauna performance, the dual roles of a chef and Santa - rather than speculation. His long tenure as a critic gives his writing a steady, matter-of-fact voice that treats entertainment as a serious subject without losing sight of fun, which distinguishes his coverage from generic listings or hype-driven pieces.