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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In writer-director Marti Noxon's drama, a young woman (Lily Collins) battles anorexia at an in-patient facility. The film, rounded out by a great cast, offers a knowing, intimate take on the disease. -
Director Patrick Shen features plenty of talking heads opining about our essential need for quiet and solitude, but this film works best when he captures moments of pristine, meditative stillness. -
This raunch-fest comedy about a wild (and lethal) bachelorette party stumbles out of the gate, but once Kate McKinnon's Aussie-for-no-particular-reason character shows up, so do the laughs. -
Director Patty Jenkins understands the scale of a screen superhero who is a true demigod, not an ordinary millionaire or spider-bite victim. -
War Machine,a Netflix production based on a book about the drawn-out U.S. military operations in Afghanistan, suffers from a one-note Brad Pitt performance and a frustrating lack of focus. -
Based on Nicola Yoon's YA novel, Everything, Everythinghas some of the ingredients it needs to be satisfying, but the way it uses illness only as a plot device makes that satisfaction elusive. -
John Cena and Aaron Taylor-Johnson star in Doug Liman's stripped-down, real-time thriller. Despite its script's many contrivances, critic Scott Tobias says Liman's direction is tense and unrelenting. -
In this tale of two couples struggling with a moral dilemma, strong performances get drowned in endless flashbacks and needless backstory that render the central drama flavorless. -
A new documentary charts the long and loving marriage of a production designer and a film researcher; critic Scott Tobias calls it "sublime and inspiring." -
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.
