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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Sophie Fiennes' film about the legendary performer "achieve[s] a level of intimacy and candor ... that's uncommon for documentaries about figures who control their images this closely." -
Director John Krasinski's tense, well-acted horror film is about a family attempting to survive an invasion by terrifying creatures who hunt via sound. -
Reynolds plays a vain, pathetic version of himself in a film full of moments so sappy and overplayed they feel "less like self-deprecation than elder abuse." -
Max Winkler's tale of a teenager who uses sex to get revenge on a man who may or may not have assaulted her step-brother is a "glib character study" that tries too hard to shock. -
Director Travis Wilkerson's great-grandfather killed an unarmed black man in 1946 Alabama and got away with it. With self-lacerating fury, the film posits racial violence as a kind of erasure. -
Director Duncan Jones' latest film, a direct-to-Netflix sci-fi/noir tale set in a dystopian Berlin, so narrowly focuses on its hero's traumatic backstory it neglects its fantastic setting. -
In the age of digital animation, Nick Park and his team at Aardman are still animating with their actual digits; this lovingly made tale of a prehistoric soccer rivalry is full of charm. -
Young, directionless Brooklynites have their lives (slightly) complicated by the arrival of a beautiful young woman (Emily Browning) in Alex Ross Perry's "precociously fretful" new film. -
Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami's final film is a series of 24 wordless images, each four-and-a-half minutes long, ever-so-slightly animated. -
The longest, and last, of the Maze Runner films puts its bland teen heroes through the usual paces, but there are enough strong character actors around to keep things interesting.
