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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Leigh Whannell's update of the H.G. Wells novel traffics in a "psychological realism that's unusual for the genre," which effectively transforms it into " Gaslightwith a horror twist."
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Stars Issa Rae and LaKeith Stanfield have great chemistry, but this earnest romantic drama feels "curiously flat and under-seasoned."
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Robert Downey Jr.'s first post-Marvel Universe foray "is not a film. Dolittle is a crime scene in need of forensic analysis. Something happened here. Something terrible. Something inexplicable."
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Writer-director Elizabeth Banks' take on the franchise plays "like a campy, under-budgeted 'Mission: Impossible,' " that loses momentum whenever Stewart is off-screen.
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Mike Flanagan directs a meandering, imitative sequel to both the Stephen King book and the Stanley Kubrick movie, The Shining; its nonhorror elements prove more persuasive than its scares.
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This "extremely weird" sequel to the 2014 film that riffed on Disney's Sleeping Beauty shunts its main character off-screen for most of its running time, in favor of CGI spectacle.
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The not-so-stealthy reboot of the sci-fi/comedy franchise skimps on comedy to focus on world-building, an overplotted story and set dressing.
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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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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.
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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.