Scott Tobias Movie Reviews & Previews

Critics » Scott Tobias

Official Websites:
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Scott Tobias

Agrees with the Tomatometer 78% of the time.

Biography:: I see movies, watch DVDs, and read books, then I get paid to write what I think of them. Beats doing stuff.
Favorites:: Top 5 (no order): Sansho The Bailiff, Duck Soup, Tokyo Story, Shoot The Piano Player, Taxi Driver
Publications:: AV Club , Glyphs Film Guide , rec.arts.movies.reviews , Time Out New York
Critics' Group:: Chicago Film Critics Association

Total Reviews:: 933

Location:: Chicago

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Showing 1 - 50 of 933

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Rating	T-Meter	Title \| Year	Add Date
	82%	Sightseers (2013)	" It may be the satirist's credo to spare no one, but in Sightseers, no one is spared Wheatley's smug superiority." — NPR Posted May 9, 2013
	67%	Greetings From Tim Buckley (2013)	" What redeems the film, ultimately, are Jeff's poignant efforts to unburden himself of his father's oppressive legacy and stand on his own merits." — NPR Posted May 3, 2013
	51%	Post Tenebras Lux (2013)	" It's as if Reygadas started with a sprawling cache of visual ideas and then tried to find some way to organize them all. The effect can be frustrating at times, but also surprising and beguiling." — NPR Posted May 3, 2013
	46%	Pain & Gain (2013)	" [Bay] blankets the film in a tone of smug self-awareness that obscures everything but its bald hypocrisy." — NPR Posted Apr 25, 2013
	72%	Elephant (2003)	" Elephant creates gorgeous, wide-open spaces that allow viewers the freedom to reflect without having a point-of-view imposed on them." — AV Club Posted Apr 24, 2013
	56%	Oblivion (2013)	" Kosinski's personal commitment to gorgeous artifice above all other considerations only harms the film so much." — NPR Posted Apr 18, 2013
	76%	It's a Disaster (2013)	" For most of the way, it's clever and smartly proportioned, with the action confined to one well-exploited location and gags about love, the curdling of long-term friendships and petty social mores popping off everywhere." — NPR Posted Apr 11, 2013
C+	77%	42 (2013)	" It's thoroughly embalmed in the glossy lacquer of conventional baseball movies, and limited further by trying to deal with the horrors of racism in that context." — AV Club Posted Apr 11, 2013
B+	42%	To The Wonder (2013)	" Malick persists in refining his style to the barest essentials of sound and image, caring little whether he's out of step with the times." — AV Club Posted Apr 11, 2013
	75%	Simon Killer (2013)	" The film is frequently masterful, suggesting the turbulent inner state of an American sociopath who believes himself to be a good guy." — NPR Posted Apr 5, 2013
A	88%	Upstream Color (2013)	" Upstream Color is one of the greatest realizations of the digital dream, which was supposed to allow filmmakers to express a full, idiosyncratic vision from outside the system." — AV Club Posted Apr 4, 2013
B+	62%	Evil Dead (2013)	" Alvarez just keeps on amplifying the gory intensity until the film becomes absurd and weirdly infectious, an exercise in seeing how far the audience will bend without breaking." — AV Club Posted Apr 4, 2013
	94%	Room 237 (2013)	" A thrilling testament to the fact that art is - and should be - open to interpretation." — NPR Posted Mar 28, 2013
C+	59%	Detour (2013)	" Dickerson passes on the occasion for existential drama and goes for the race-against-the-clock urgency of an ordinary guy trying to crawl out of his predicament. It's effective enough, but there isn't much to it." — AV Club Posted Mar 28, 2013
C	65%	Starbuck (2013)	" The Citizen Kane of sperm-donor comedies." — AV Club Posted Mar 28, 2013
C	28%	G.I. Joe: Retaliation (2013)	" A lumbering beast, bogged down by too many characters and an incomprehensible plot." — AV Club Posted Mar 28, 2013
B-	95%	The Return (Vozvrashcheniye) (2003)	" Throughout his expertly controlled film, Zvyagintsev never allows a break in the clouds to provide some reassuring sign that the brothers are on solid footing." — AV Club Posted Mar 27, 2013
A-	92%	Top of the Lake (2013)	" Though it's hard to make any firm statements about the plotting through two-sevenths of the story, Top Of The Lake is succeeding so far where Campion's other attempt at genre subversion, 2003's In The Cut, fell drastically short." — AV Club Posted Mar 22, 2013
	91%	Gimme The Loot (2013)	" A warm and wonderfully discursive slice-of-life story, with an emphasis on language and local color and a great feel for the longings of working-class adolescents." — NPR Posted Mar 21, 2013
B-	80%	Eden (2013)	" Griffiths and her screenwriter, Rick Phillips Jr., manage the tricky business of evoking the specific horrors of sex slavery without languishing in the lurid and graphic." — AV Club Posted Mar 21, 2013
D	47%	Olympus Has Fallen (2013)	" The one and only consolation for audiences is that the end of the world would never, ever happen this way." — AV Club Posted Mar 21, 2013
B-	69%	The Croods (2013)	" The fact that it constantly undermines its own message doesn't entirely diminish its base appeal." — AV Club Posted Mar 21, 2013
	81%	From Up On Poppy Hill (2013)	" Those gorgeous, hand-drawn images bring lightness and grace to a story that might seem drab and pedestrian in the real world." — NPR Posted Mar 14, 2013
C	41%	The Call (2013)	" A tense and efficient little thriller right up to the moment when Halle Berry, a 911 operator, decides to leave her desk." — AV Club Posted Mar 14, 2013
C+	66%	Spring Breakers (2013)	" Surrendering to the Korine paradox has never been more tempting than it is with Spring Breakers, which is lush and exuberant and gives his admittedly brilliant eye its fullest expression to date." — AV Club Posted Mar 14, 2013
C	71%	My Amityville Horror (2013)	" My Amityville Horror doesn't go far in sussing out fact from fiction-it just adds more noise to the myth." — AV Club Posted Mar 14, 2013
B+	79%	Reality (2013)	" While its barbs on celebrity and reality television are expected and a little facile, they're mostly a misdirect for a story about family, community, and religion ..." — AV Club Posted Mar 14, 2013
	65%	Don't Stop Believin': Everyman's Journey (2013)	" Diaz insists on selling Pineda's promo-friendly myth at the expense of the richer, more complicated story of a dreamer who learns to become the durable professional his bandmates expect." — NPR Posted Mar 7, 2013
C+	53%	The Girl (2013)	" It's unfortunate that Riker's strong central character and evocative location work get undermined, at every turn, by a plot that not only springs zero surprises, but reduces the terror and loss of Cornish's charges to mere life lessons for her." — AV Club Posted Mar 7, 2013
A-	90%	Beyond The Hills (2013)	" Beyond The Hills has a rich understanding of the appeals and perils of religious values that provide structure and meaning to some while seeming cruel and irrational to outsiders." — AV Club Posted Mar 7, 2013
C+	60%	Oz the Great and Powerful (2013)	" There's some overlap between Raimi's irreverent sensibility and the large-scale fractured fairytale his Hollywood betters seem to want, but there's tension, too, and the persistent clank of an overly tinkered machine." — AV Club Posted Mar 7, 2013
D	13%	The Last Exorcism Part II (2013)	" An abysmal sequel that abandons the found-footage concept, along with the pockets of wit and originality that made its predecessor salvageable." — AV Club Posted Mar 1, 2013
	67%	Stoker (2013)	" Stoker's ultimate wispiness makes Park's achievement all the more impressive: He's the magician pulling a deft sleight of hand, waiting until the very last moment to reveal that all is illusion." — NPR Posted Feb 28, 2013
C	89%	A Place at the Table (2013)	" A graceless info-dump bracketed by interviews with activists and a handful of personal stories from suffering families around the country." — AV Club Posted Feb 28, 2013
C	25%	Phantom (2013)	" A film that promises the threat of World War III sinks limply into the murky depths." — AV Club Posted Feb 28, 2013
C+	34%	Dark Skies (2013)	" It's a generic repository of everything that's currently en vogue in commercial horror: a PG-13 haunted-house movie with body possession, lots of digital shocks, and some of the surveillance-cam creep of the Paranormal Activity series." — AV Club Posted Feb 22, 2013
	58%	Snitch (2013)	" Whatever lizard-brain fun might have been had in watching Johnson do battle against a drug cartel is weakened by the occasional hard tug at the social conscience. The film winds up divided against itself." — NPR Posted Feb 21, 2013
C	60%	Rubberneck (2013)	" Rubberneck feels more like an attempt to pull off a psychological thriller than a credible example of same, as if it were a sample reel for some future project." — AV Club Posted Feb 21, 2013
B	78%	Red Flag (2013)	" Modest, personal, and nicely proportioned, Red Flag resembles one of Hong Sang-soo's self-reflexive doodles about relationships and filmmaking-Oki's Movie, in particular-and it wisely doesn't take too big a bite." — AV Club Posted Feb 21, 2013
C-	15%	A Good Day To Die Hard (2013)	" Until now, the sequels have gotten away with the cynical franchising of John McClane, but A Good Day To Die Hard, the worst entry in the series by far, exposes the hollowness and stupidity of McClane 2.0." — AV Club Posted Feb 14, 2013
D+	13%	Safe Haven (2013)	" There's some theoretical appeal to the story of two emotionally damaged people learning to love again -- "theoretical" because the film needs better actors than Hough and Duhamel, and richer conversation than a shared enthusiasm for kale." — AV Club Posted Feb 14, 2013
	52%	The Playroom (2013)	" Between the loaded conversations and metaphors, and the phony overlay of a children's fairy tale, The Playroom can't stop telegraphing themes and interpreting itself. There's nothing left for the audience to do." — NPR Posted Feb 7, 2013
B	93%	Lore (2013)	" Shot with a detail-oriented expressiveness that occasionally edges into overly precious imagery, Lore excels mostly as a survival film, as Rosendahl barters jewelry and trinkets for whatever food and favors she can collect along the way." — AV Club Posted Feb 7, 2013
B+	85%	Side Effects (2013)	" Of the many twists and turns in Steven Soderbergh's vastly entertaining thriller Side Effects, the most gratifying has less to do with the nimble plotting than the fact that it isn't the type of movie it initially appears to be." — AV Club Posted Feb 7, 2013
	37%	Stand Up Guys (2013)	" Actor-turned-director Fisher Stevens gravely misjudges the tone - when he isn't trying to get too cute about everything, he slathers his characters in unearned sentimentality." — NPR Posted Jan 31, 2013
A-	92%	The Gatekeepers (2013)	" The Gatekeepers serves as a terrifying oracle, with Israel forevermore a powder keg waiting to go off." — AV Club Posted Jan 31, 2013
B-	47%	Bullet to the Head (2013)	" Hill works his usual magic on the big confrontations -- the punches hit so hard that the sound of ax handles clacking isn't much blunter -- but elevating a generic piece of future cable-filler isn't the same as salvaging it." — AV Club Posted Jan 31, 2013
	60%	John Dies at the End (2013)	" Once the colorful anecdotes sprawl out into an actual narrative, the film gets convoluted and loud, amplifying the weirdness without doing much to clarify it." — NPR Posted Jan 24, 2013
	87%	Happy People: A Year in the Taiga (2013)	" An inspired 94-minute rumination on the hardships and liberties of a remote culture." — NPR Posted Jan 24, 2013

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