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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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. -
Sam Waterston stars in this ensemble piece that frustratingly refuses to reveal connections between its many stories until it's too late to engage viewers. -
Quentin Tarantino makes a three-hour Western pastiche with help from Samuel L. Jackson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and a cast of other old and new associates. -
The British entertainer clearly wants to borrow ideas from Michael Moore's metaphorical guidebook on economic jeremiads, but he mostly manages to grab from the least interesting chapters. -
The story of the ship that inspired Moby-Dickwould have been better off without relying quite so heavily on that connection and the existential questions it inspires. -
Lee adapts Aristophanes' Lysistratainto the story of a Chicago woman who pledges to withhold sex as leverage to stop violence. -
The American remake of an Argentinian Oscar winner doesn't do enough to distinguish itself from the original, though it finds a few interesting angles. -
The Coopers are yet another family who've gift-wrapped their dysfunction and brought it home for Christmas. -
Drew Barrymore and Toni Collette are convincing as lifelong friends facing both good and bad together, even if the film feels ragged and too forcefully directed at times. -
Director David Gordon Green's loose adaptation of a documentary about American political consultants meddling in other nations works as a comedic vehicle for Sandra Bullock, but sputters as satire.
