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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Though some elements generate fresh sparks, the remake "mostly has the beat-for-beat quality of the live-action Beauty and the Beast, the current standard-bearer for pointlessness." -
Green Room, from the director of the well-regarded thriller Blue Ruin,is the violent and inventive story of a touring punk band that gets in way over its head. -
Jake Gyllenhaal plays a man who starts literally destroying his surroundings out of grief in Demolition, from director Jean-Marc Vallee. -
Chantal Akerman's No Home Moviecaptures conversations the filmmaker had with her mother, which take on additional weight given that both women have died since the film was made. -
There's not much to My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2, but for those who've missed the raucous Portokalos clan since 2002, it's fun to visit with them again. -
The third film in the Divergentseries expends great effort to render the faction system on which it relies easier to understand, but that doesn't necessarily make it more entertaining. -
Tina Fey stars as a war reporter in a film that struggles to attain a complicated tonal balance between comedy and commentary that it can't quite manage. -
Half a drama about religious hysteria and half a horror film about isolation, The Witchfollows a family struggling to identify the source of an evil that seems to plague them. -
It's not hard to believe Zoolander 2 suffers from plot problems, but even beyond that, it can't find the rhythm with its gags at the expense of fashion, either. -
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.
