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."
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Director Tomas Alfredson buries a pulpy serial-killer yarn under an avalanche of portentous, boring, art-house fussiness.
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The directorial debut of actor Andy Serkis features strong performances from Andrew Garfield and Claire Foy but opts for inspiration over intimacy.
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The documentary follows a man and woman on the autism spectrum as they negotiate love — and sex.
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First-time director Kevin Phillips displays a remarkable gift for evoking a time and place, but loses control when this tale of a teenage friendship shifts from character study to grisly thriller.
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Director David Gordon Green's film stands out from others like it because it prizes "understanding Bauman's perspective and the private burdens of being a hero" over simple uplift.
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Stephen King's tale of a shape-shifting clown that haunts a small Maine town gets an adaptation that features fine performances but relies on a barrage of repetitive jump scares.
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In this closely observed drama about a Brooklyn teen whose sexuality conflicts with his sense of self, writer/director Eliza Hittman makes us feel the social pressures working on him.
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The film, based on Jeannette Walls' memoir of her nomadic, impoverished childhood, clings to the book's lyrical imagery in ways too overdetermined to work on the big screen.
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Many noir thrillers play with misogynistic ideas, but "68 Kill keeps the hostility and loses the self-deprecation, which turns it into an example of misogyny rather than an examination of it."