Scott Tobias
Scott Tobias is the film editor of The A.V. Club, the arts and entertainment section of The Onion, where he's worked as a staff writer for over a decade. His reviews have also appeared in Time Out New York, City Pages, The Village Voice, The Nashville Scene, and The Hollywood Reporter. Along with other members of the A.V. Club staff, he co-authored the 2002 interview anthology The Tenacity Of the Cockroach and the new book Inventory, a collection of pop-culture lists.
Though Tobias received a formal education at the University Of Georgia and the University Of Miami, his film education was mostly extracurricular. As a child, he would draw pictures on strips of construction paper and run them through the slats on the saloon doors separating the dining room from the kitchen. As an undergraduate, he would rearrange his class schedule in order to spend long afternoons watching classic films on the 7th floor of the UGA library. He cut his teeth writing review for student newspapers (first review: a pan of the Burt Reynolds comedy Cop and a Half) and started freelancing for the A.V. Club in early 1999.
Tobias currently resides in Chicago, where he shares a too-small apartment with his wife, his daughter, two warring cats and the pug who agitates them.
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Writer/director Alan Yang turns away from his proven track record in comedy for this "earnest, drippy" multi-generational drama that traffics in underwritten, wanly dramatized conflicts. -
Avi Belkin's documentary of the late 60 Minutes interrogator explores the ambiguous space Wallace occupied between journalistic rigor and slick showmanship. -
Though some elements generate fresh sparks, the remake "mostly has the beat-for-beat quality of the live-action Beauty and the Beast, the current standard-bearer for pointlessness." -
German director Christian Petzold adapts a 1944 Holocaust novel by setting it in the modern day. The result is a haunting and beguiling narrative of 21st-century displacement. -
An evocative setting and a chewily fun performance from Timothy Spall as a mysterious and malevolent figure can't keep this New Zealand film from trafficking in tired tropes. -
This flat attempt to map contemporary anxieties over the template of more grisly films like Saw only "recalls the mechanized horror trend while sanding off its serrated edges." -
Steve Coogan and John C. Reilly star as Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy in a film that struggles to keep its energy up as it follows the decline of two great film comedians. -
The first half is a tense, painfully real family drama about the lingering toll of opioid addiction; the second half lurches into thriller territory thick with stock types and cliches. -
The sequel to Wreck-it Ralph is awash with jokes about cross-promotion, brand extension, comments sections and Disney clichés; it feels like the way we live now — with more heart. -
Documentarian Frederick Wiseman aims his camera at the daily rhythms of life in and around a small town — and holds his focus long enough to find something beyond media stereotypes.
