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 Alan Yang turns away from his proven track record in comedy for this "earnest, drippy" multi-generational drama that traffics in underwritten, wanly dramatized conflicts. -
Director John Krasinski's tense, well-acted horror film is about a family attempting to survive an invasion by terrifying creatures who hunt via sound. -
Director Travis Wilkerson's great-grandfather killed an unarmed black man in 1946 Alabama and got away with it. With self-lacerating fury, the film posits racial violence as a kind of erasure.
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Have Cloak, Will Astral-Travel: Benedict Cumberbatch stars as Marvel's Master of the Mystic Arts in a film that's visually stunning but doggedly familiar in structure. -
Quentin Tarantino makes a three-hour Western pastiche with help from Samuel L. Jackson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and a cast of other old and new associates. -
Its tone is ultimately sour, but at its brittle, nasty core, Ben Wheatley's slasher-tourism comedy fits squarely in the tradition of British class-resentment pictures like Kind Hearts and Coronets and The Ruling Class. -
Wreck-It Ralph, from the creative forces at Disney-Pixar, constructs a multidimensional behind-the-scenes world of arcade games. Critic Scott Tobias says the misfit characters are the perfect vehicles for the message that even the biggest of "wrecks" can find a place to fit in. (Recommended)
