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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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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Steve Coogan and John C. Reilly star as Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy in a film that struggles to keep its energy up as it follows the decline of two great film comedians.
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Paul Thomas Anderson's film about a London dressmaker in the 1950s is "a rare combination of audacity and precision, impeccably tailored yet full of mystery and magic," says critic Scott Tobias.
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In adapting Paula Hawkins' hugely popular novel, filmmakers never manage to make its twisty story register as anything more than an exercise in convoluted plot machinations.
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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)
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Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn star as neighborhood-patrol members who stumble upon an alien invasion in The Watch. Critic Scott Tobias says the movie does little to expand on the Ghostbusters template it follows so closely.