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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Writer-director Elizabeth Banks' take on the franchise plays "like a campy, under-budgeted 'Mission: Impossible,' " that loses momentum whenever Stewart is off-screen. -
What could have been a cringeworthy misfire of tweens fumbling toward sex instead turns into a winning comedy that gets the sweetness-to-raunch ratio miraculously right. -
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." -
The sequel to Wreck-it Ralph is awash with jokes about cross-promotion, brand extension, comments sections and Disney clichés; it feels like the way we live now — with more heart. -
Director Patty Jenkins understands the scale of a screen superhero who is a true demigod, not an ordinary millionaire or spider-bite victim. -
The latest animated film from Laika Studios owes more to the emotional impressionism of Japanese anime master Hayao Miyazaki than the comparatively rigid and familiar story structure of Disney/Pixar. -
David Lowery's remake of a minor 1977 Disney feature improves on the original by dialing down the slapstick and dialing up the humanity — and the tears. -
Steven Spielberg directs an adaptation of the Roald Dahl book that goes long on sentiment and on ... well, length, but finds charm in its deployment of Mark Rylance as the CGI giant's voice. -
As boys, Chris and Eric made an ingenious shot-for-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark that earned cult status. A new documentary reunites them to film the one shot they never managed to get. -
Jake Gyllenhaal plays a man who starts literally destroying his surroundings out of grief in Demolition, from director Jean-Marc Vallee.
