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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A 14-year-old girl finds herself drawn to bull riding in this "humble and low-key to a fault" debut feature.
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Rachel Mason and her siblings grew up unaware that their parents ran a gay bookstore. Her "affectionate but thinly realized" documentary skims the surface of stories that deserve deeper dives.
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This documentary about an under-recognized abstract painter presents "an extensive case for Klint as a major artist while casting a jaundiced eye on how art history gets written."
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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.
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Polish director Malgorzata Szumowska's film about a young woman (Raffey Cassidy) questioning her place in a remote religious cult wears its broad allegory on its (woolen) sleeve.
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Levan Akin's tale of two male Georgian dancers who find happiness in stolen moments together goes through all the usual dance-movie paces, but the chemistry between its two leads is strong.
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Robert Downey Jr.'s first post-Marvel Universe foray "is not a film. Dolittle is a crime scene in need of forensic analysis. Something happened here. Something terrible. Something inexplicable."
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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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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.