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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This Russian rock musical set in the nightclubs of '80s Leningrad is strongest when it leaves a cliche-ridden love-triangle plot behind to focus on the rebellious, heart-lifting spirit of music. -
The director who has boomeranged from better-regarded films to ones treated much less kindly barely wants to own this crime thriller. But for fans of his work, there are sequences to admire. -
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." -
Rebel Wilson and Anne Hathaway never generate any chemistry as a pair of con artists in the French Riviera, and the labored script never generates any heat. -
Charlize Theron and Seth Rogen spark off each other in what is essentially a gender-swapped The American President, though the film's cursory understanding of politics feels woefully out-of-touch. -
Pamela D. Green's enlightening documentary adds to the already strong case that Guy-Blaché was the first female auteur of cinema, though in doing so it strives to connect a few too many dots. -
Alex Ross Perry's visceral, difficult film about a visceral, difficult punk singer (Elisabeth Moss) unfolds in a series of bracingly raw and uncompromising set-pieces. -
Though less thematically precise than Get Out, Jordan Peele's latest film doubles down on horror — and excels at capturing the mundane, funny moments between the big scares. -
Banned from filmmaking by the Iranian government, director Jafar Panahi has stealthily crafted a fiction/documentary hybrid about the complicated ways old traditions intersect modern life. -
German director Christian Petzold adapts a 1944 Holocaust novel by setting it in the modern day. The result is a haunting and beguiling narrative of 21st-century displacement.
