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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Unlike the more allegorical Meet the Feebles or Team America: World Police, this latest excuse to make jokes about puppet-sex isn't interested in doing anything more than make jokes about puppet-sex.
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Director John Krasinski's tense, well-acted horror film is about a family attempting to survive an invasion by terrifying creatures who hunt via sound.
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Reynolds plays a vain, pathetic version of himself in a film full of moments so sappy and overplayed they feel "less like self-deprecation than elder abuse."
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Gary Oldman (and a pair of latex jowls) star as Winston Churchill reckoning with the lonely decisions that imperil thousands of soldiers' lives.
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Universal is trying to get a franchise of monster movies going, but Tom Cruise's tired turn as a man who accidentally awakens a sleeping mummy doesn't get them off to a very good start.
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Director Patty Jenkins understands the scale of a screen superhero who is a true demigod, not an ordinary millionaire or spider-bite victim.
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This unexceptional documentary about an exceptional chef — the chief innovator of California cuisine — dutifully traces his rise and self-imposed exile, but leaves the viewer hungry.
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Charlie Day and Ice Cube lead a great cast, but this comedy, filled with cruel pranks and retrograde notions of masculinity, "leaves a sour aftertaste," says critic Scott Tobias.
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The Dark Knight lightens up, already: In this frenetic, loosely structured Bat-sequel to 2014's The LEGO Movie, Will Arnett's arrogant Batman finally gets over himself.
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A couple takes pride in rejecting the trappings of a conventional married life — but the form their rejection takes is so marked by cliché that the film fails to sustain interest.