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 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.
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An evocative setting and a chewily fun performance from Timothy Spall as a mysterious and malevolent figure can't keep this New Zealand film from trafficking in tired tropes.
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In this update of a 2000 Nancy Meyers hit, Taraji P. Henson is a sports agent who reads men's minds. But gender-flipping the original film weakens the premise — and the humor.
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This flat attempt to map contemporary anxieties over the template of more grisly films like Saw only "recalls the mechanized horror trend while sanding off its serrated edges."
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Director Travis Knight takes over from Michael Bay, and sets about getting viewers to care about characters instead of assaulting our senses. The result is surprisingly watchable.
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The film follows Gary Hart (Hugh Jackman) through his three-week presidential bid that fell victim to monkey business, but what director Jason Reitman brings to it is familiar — even quaint.
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The exquisite atmosphere and sense of foreboding that made John Bellairs' 1973 book a children's classic gets discarded in favor of a relentless riot of jump-scares and visual noise.
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Unlike the more allegorical Meet the Feebles or Team America: World Police, this latest excuse to make jokes about puppet-sex isn't interested in doing anything more than make jokes about puppet-sex.
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This "hit-or-miss goof" of an ensemble comedy, about grown men playing a child's game, features a loaded cast, a great soundtrack and impressive action set-pieces.
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Adrift, starring Sam Claflin and Shailene Woodley, could have been a generic disaster film, if not for some clever editing that helps pull together its themes.