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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The film follows Gary Hart (Hugh Jackman) through his three-week presidential bid that fell victim to monkey business, but what director Jason Reitman brings to it is familiar — even quaint. -
"It's juvenile. It's irritating. Yet it's also fiendishly clever in the way it anticipates and dismantles every argument that could be made against it," says critic Scott Tobias. -
Documentarian Frederick Wiseman aims his camera at the daily rhythms of life in and around a small town — and holds his focus long enough to find something beyond media stereotypes. -
Jonah Hill writes and directs this semi-autobiographical coming-of-age tale about a boy who embraces skater culture; the film faithfully documents the era, but offers no point of view. -
Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti play a New York couple struggling to conceive in writer/director Tamara Jenkins' latest, which examines how infertility tests a relationship with humorous candor. -
The exquisite atmosphere and sense of foreboding that made John Bellairs' 1973 book a children's classic gets discarded in favor of a relentless riot of jump-scares and visual noise. -
A young man in Paris studies film and has a lot of sex and meandering, passionate conversations about the state of cinema in this "honest, reflective, a little pretentious" (and veryFrench) movie. -
Unlike the more allegorical Meet the Feebles or Team America: World Police, this latest excuse to make jokes about puppet-sex isn't interested in doing anything more than make jokes about puppet-sex. -
Ken Marino directs this conventional if disjointed ensemble rom-com about disparate Los Angeles dog owners. The film finds its legs whenever it leans into its alt-comedy cast and cameos. -
Writer/director Elijah Bynum's debut feature, a "nostalgia-soaked coming-of-age drama set in 1991 Cape Cod," is so beholden to its influences it never manages to escape their shadow.
