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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This sprawling, chaotic comedy about a sprawling, chaotic holiday party expects its improv-tested cast to make up for its skimpy script. Some performers do; most don't.
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Director Pablo Larraín narrows the focus of his Jackie Kennedy biopic to a handful of days around the JFK assassination, and keeps his camera trained on Natalie Portman's expressive face.
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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.
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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.
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A small-town bouncer is recruited as a minor league hockey enforcer in a sweet and bloody comedy throwback to sports movies of the 1970s. Critic Scott Tobias says star Sean William Scott (Role Models) has found his Hamlet with a masterful comic performance as the affable, dimwitted goon.
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Adam Sandler's latest dud, about a divorcee wooing a young schoolteacher, quickly writes itself into a corner — a corner crammed full of faux family. Based on the 1965 play Cactus Flower, Sandler's Just Go With It plays like loose improv when it really ought to play like farce.