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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Photographer/documentarian Lauren Greenfield (The Queen of Versailles) offers many examples of excessive wealth around the globe, but the resulting portrait lacks a clear point of view. -
A dispute over a tree brings two neighboring households into grimly escalating conflict in this Icelandic comedy so pitch-black that "the laughs are strictly of the stuck-in-the-throat variety." -
Despite a fascinating subject and an impressive cast, this tale of MLB catcher Moe Berg's stint as an OSS agent simply presents the facts without generating any insights. -
This "hit-or-miss goof" of an ensemble comedy, about grown men playing a child's game, features a loaded cast, a great soundtrack and impressive action set-pieces. -
While it's raunchier than Love, Simon - if less self-assured — writer-director Craig Johnson's film about a teen (Daniel Doheny) attempting to figure himself out is just as "deeply conventional." -
Adrift, starring Sam Claflin and Shailene Woodley, could have been a generic disaster film, if not for some clever editing that helps pull together its themes. -
When the film puts its four leads together, it sparkles. When they're apart, it's simply "a pleasant, low-stakes affair, as numbing as a two-glass buzz." -
Gabrielle Union stars in a thriller that fails on the fundamentals, and never capitalizes on its setting — a tricked-out, high-security family estate. -
Critic Scott Tobias says the updated Anna Faris/Eugenio Derbez take on the 1987 comedy is "not a particularly funny film, but it's big-hearted and sincere, with fine chemistry between the two leads." -
Two young women (Alia Shawkat and Laia Costa) launch into a relationship, resolving to be completely truthful with each other. The film's insistent nature lacks subtlety or modulation.
