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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The dangers are existential in this "anti-thriller," in which a truck driver must navigate Serbia's back roads carrying an unknown payload.
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Avi Belkin's documentary of the late 60 Minutes interrogator explores the ambiguous space Wallace occupied between journalistic rigor and slick showmanship.
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Based on a YA novel told from Ophelia's perspective, Claire McCarthy's film is by turns too glib and too reverent with the source material, hopelessly blurring its point of view.
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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.
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Alex Ross Perry's visceral, difficult film about a visceral, difficult punk singer (Elisabeth Moss) unfolds in a series of bracingly raw and uncompromising set-pieces.
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German director Christian Petzold adapts a 1944 Holocaust novel by setting it in the modern day. The result is a haunting and beguiling narrative of 21st-century displacement.
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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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This British heist film, based on a true story, assembles Michael Caine, Jim Broadbent and other venerable actors but lacks the stylistic flourish that great caper movies demand.
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Paraguay's Oscar submission to this year's best foreign film category is a tender, quietly magical gem about a middle-aged aristocrat forced to start over.