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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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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Despite a stellar cast, the back half of Andy Muschietti's adaptation of King's novel gets bogged down by lugubrious pacing and exhausts the audience.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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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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The first half is a tense, painfully real family drama about the lingering toll of opioid addiction; the second half lurches into thriller territory thick with stock types and cliches.