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.
-
An ad exec (Will Smith) mourning the death of his daughter meets actors portraying abstract concepts in this absurd, disingenuous film which lays bare Hollywood's inability to grapple with grief.
-
Director Pablo Larraín narrows the focus of his Jackie Kennedy biopic to a handful of days around the JFK assassination, and keeps his camera trained on Natalie Portman's expressive face.
-
Director Peter Berg's movie about the massive 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico ratchets up the cinematic tension, but quickly devolves into rote disaster-movie cliches.
-
David Lowery's remake of a minor 1977 Disney feature improves on the original by dialing down the slapstick and dialing up the humanity — and the tears.
-
The comedy trio known as The Lonely Island blows its goofy musical parodies up to feature length in the story of a boy-band veteran with limitless ego who decides to go solo.
-
Writer-director Shane Black's first feature script, Lethal Weapon, made him a star. His latest proves that he's still got the stuff when it comes to buddy-cop action comedy.
-
The sketch comedy duo Key and Peele pull off the difficult feat of translating their sensibility into a feature film that recalls out-all-night sagas like Adventures In Babysitting.
-
Tina Fey stars as a war reporter in a film that struggles to attain a complicated tonal balance between comedy and commentary that it can't quite manage.
-
Director Michael Bay makes no effort to put history in context in dramatizing the 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi; he treats it as a setting for rah-rah action.
-
Lee adapts Aristophanes' Lysistrata into the story of a Chicago woman who pledges to withhold sex as leverage to stop violence.