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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Despite a stellar cast, the back half of Andy Muschietti's adaptation of King's novel gets bogged down by lugubrious pacing and exhausts the audience.
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The dangers are existential in this "anti-thriller," in which a truck driver must navigate Serbia's back roads carrying an unknown payload.
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What could have been a cringeworthy misfire of tweens fumbling toward sex instead turns into a winning comedy that gets the sweetness-to-raunch ratio miraculously right.
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Great performances from Walton Goggins, Olivia Colman and others only underscore the by-the-numbers story and shallowly observed setting of this drama set in an Appalachian snake-handling church.
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Avi Belkin's documentary of the late 60 Minutes interrogator explores the ambiguous space Wallace occupied between journalistic rigor and slick showmanship.
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Louis Garrel's second film as a director is a dry romantic comedy that involves a love triangle, and "watching it unfold can feel at times like an anthropological study of the French species."
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Based on a YA novel told from Ophelia's perspective, Claire McCarthy's film is by turns too glib and too reverent with the source material, hopelessly blurring its point of view.
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The not-so-stealthy reboot of the sci-fi/comedy franchise skimps on comedy to focus on world-building, an overplotted story and set dressing.
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This Russian rock musical set in the nightclubs of '80s Leningrad is strongest when it leaves a cliche-ridden love-triangle plot behind to focus on the rebellious, heart-lifting spirit of music.
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The director who has boomeranged from better-regarded films to ones treated much less kindly barely wants to own this crime thriller. But for fans of his work, there are sequences to admire.