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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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. -
Janelle Monae, Taraji P. Henson and Octavia Spencer star in this drama about the brilliant African-American women whose mathematical skills NASA eagerly exploited ... without publicly acknowledging. -
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. -
This sprawling, chaotic comedy about a sprawling, chaotic holiday party expects its improv-tested cast to make up for its skimpy script. Some performers do; most don't. -
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. -
The original Bad Santahas long delighted holiday misanthropes, but an "irredeemably squishy center," says critic Scott Tobias, means its sequel won't give them what they crave. -
A by-the-numbers holiday film in which a soulful performance from Danny Glover fails to buoy the proceedings above familiar family squabbles that get dutifully, and too-tidily, resolved. -
Have Cloak, Will Astral-Travel: Benedict Cumberbatch stars as Marvel's Master of the Mystic Arts in a film that's visually stunning but doggedly familiar in structure. -
Director Antonio Campos presents the story of Christine Chubbuck, a young TV reporter in Sarasota, Fla., who stunned viewers with her on-air suicide in 1974. -
In adapting Paula Hawkins' hugely popular novel, filmmakers never manage to make its twisty story register as anything more than an exercise in convoluted plot machinations.
