Scott Tobias

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NPR, The A.V. Club, The Dissolve, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Reveal, The Verge, UPROXX, Variety, Village Voice
For 1,915 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 46% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 51% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 3.9 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Scott Tobias' Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 62
Highest review score: 100 Sansho the Bailiff
Lowest review score: 0 AVPR: Aliens vs Predator - Requiem
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 975 out of 1915
  2. Mixed: 723 out of 1915
  3. Negative: 217 out of 1915
1915 movie reviews
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    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Scott Tobias
    The Wackness
    The Wackness' main draw is Kingsley's giddily over-the-top performance as a pothead, and the film delights in showing Gandhi sparking a huge bong or making out with Mary-Kate Olsen in a phone booth.
    • The A.V. Club
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Scott Tobias
    Towelhead
    From its title on down, Towelhead alarms and manipulates, and succeeds in goading the audience like a schoolyard bully, but apart from Bishil's harrowing attempts to find herself, the strings stay too visible.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 55 Scott Tobias
    The Tree
    On a technical level, The Tree marks a significant advance over the humble utility of Bertuccelli's previous film, drinking in Australia's pastoral majesty with an abundant eye for beauty that falls just short of the intended poetry. Yet the characters aren't nearly as resonant.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 42 Scott Tobias
    Four Christmases
    The result is two bad movies in one: a gimmicky romantic comedy, and one of those seasonal headaches that submits loud family dysfunction as a vehicle for Christmas cheer.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 50 Scott Tobias
    Skin Trade
    Everyone’s there to get the job done, Dolph Lundgren style, meaning Skin Trade is a throwback to the one-man-army actioners of the ’80s, sprinkled with updated stats on human trafficking. If the film happens to raise awareness, then that’s more bonus than objective.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 50 Scott Tobias
    Lebanon
    The film's visceral assault extends to the sledgehammer script, an amassment of unsubtle ironies and war-is-hell clichés that often reduce it to an amateurish theatrical stunt.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Scott Tobias
    The Pursuit of Happyness
    The Pursuit Of Happyness represents a belated and calculated attempt to scrape off the glossy movie-star veneer and connect with the everyday struggles of living hand-to-mouth in the big city, but it's too late. Watching his (Smith's) performance here is a little like imagining an American version of "Rosetta" starring Julia Roberts.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 60 Scott Tobias
    The Sacrifice
    Though bookended by extraordinarily powerful scenes that play off a potent religious metaphor, the middle section sinks into a morass of ill-defined relationships and uneven performances, which may be blamed in part on culture clash.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Fruitvale Station
    Coogler isn’t exactly an invisible hand. He pokes and prods his audience at every turn: Neither the false moments nor the powerful ones leave much mystery about how we’re supposed to feel.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 58 Scott Tobias
    In the Shadow of the Moon
    There's none of the poetry of "For All Mankind," just visual support for a meat-and-potatoes recap of events that have already been chewed over plenty.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Scott Tobias
    How Do You Know
    Shapeless and overlong, How Do You Know unfolds in a heap of unprocessed ideas and emotions, as if Brooks started production two or three drafts too early.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Phone Booth
    Schumacher choose to start the movie in outer space? The opening shot epitomizes everything wrong with Phone Booth: Given the chance to stage human drama on an intimate, suffocating scale, Schumacher begins in the endless expanse of the void, tricked out with gratuitous CGI effects.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Scott Tobias
    Bomb the System
    Has an exhilarating edge. It's only when they open their mouths that the movie gets into trouble.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 58 Scott Tobias
    Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
    So why, given its moment-to-moment surplus of visual imagination, does the film feel so hollow and unsatisfying?
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Scott Tobias
    Amen.
    Amen should be a powderkeg of a movie, yet the urgency and force that defined Costa-Gavras' earlier work has been drained away, along with his invigorating newsreel craft.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Scott Tobias
    Hitchcock
    Making his feature debut, director Sacha Gervasi follows up his fine documentary "Anvil: The Story Of Anvil" with another story about the perils of uncompromising creative endeavor, but his Hitchcock goes only a step beyond caricature.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 50 Scott Tobias
    Avatar
    Avatar is a weak patchwork of his other films: the leaden voiceover from "Terminator 2" here, the military/civilian conflict from "Aliens" there, even a Jack-and-Rose-style forbidden love story cued to adult-contempo soundtrack.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 Scott Tobias
    Winged Migration
    Settles into pleasant monotony and repetition, without any narrative arc or purpose. Seasoned bird-watchers, however, may find that the sensory overload leaves them close to spiritual nirvana.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    The Fly II
    The Fly movies could be a metaphor for sequels: Always go for the real article, not the freakishly mutated copy one telepod over.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 55 Scott Tobias
    Snitch
    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.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Scott Tobias
    Animals
    Searching for originality in an addiction narrative like Animals is a problem, because these stories of decline and degradation tend to sound the same. So the limited time frame is the film’s strongest asset, because it’s only paying attention to the final hours.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Scott Tobias
    The Sum of All Fears
    At once too real for escapism and too ridiculous for a credible espionage thriller, The Sum Of All Fears unfolds like a cruel joke and treats imagined human tragedy as the punchline.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 58 Scott Tobias
    Bamako
    The film feels oddly slack and inert, livened only by testimony better suited to another forum.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 50 Scott Tobias
    Charlie St. Cloud
    The film is memorable mainly for attractive people sailing and smooching against an attractive backdrop. There's no urgency behind all the preening.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Scott Tobias
    Madea's Witness Protection
    There aren't many laughs in this vaudevillian gambit, and fewer still in the fish-out-of-water comedy of Madea hosting a rich white family that's chiefly concerned with yoga, wi-fi, and their carb intakes. Still, Perry remains a true outsider artist-nobody makes movies like his. (And please don't try.)
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Scott Tobias
    Norte, the End of History
    Norte is the rare film where the characters seem simpler the longer we spend time with them. They’re humans that evolve into types.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Scott Tobias
    Mad As Hell
    There’s a promotional bent to Mad As Hell that whiffs more of branding than rigorous documentary filmmaking.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Billboard
    Zelker’s three-ring circus of digital and social-media content needs a compelling main event, and this movie seems unlikely to inspire many to check out the supplementary materials.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Two Brothers
    The tiger footage in Two Brothers would make for a solid nature documentary, but because the animals are shoehorned into a narrative, they've been anthropomorphized to death.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Scott Tobias
    Rocky Balboa
    Watching Rocky Balboa go through the usual paces does trigger a few helpless waves of nostalgia, especially once Bill Conti's famed score kicks in and Stallone sticks it to a few sides of beef. But audiences needn't be responsible for helping an over-the-hill actor through his midlife crisis.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Scott Tobias
    Mountains May Depart
    It's a powerful idea in the abstract, the culmination of three acts that cover a 25-year catastrophe with a time-lapse breathlessness. It just never leaves the abstract and becomes flesh.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    The Weight of Water
    Perhaps because the present-day characters are such insufferable twits -- especially the brooding Penn, who's given to tossing around stanzas by Yeats and Dylan Thomas -- the modern story feels like a device, a flimsy entrée into events that would be better accessed directly.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Scott Tobias
    Maggie
    Past the novelty of its conceit and casting, and the animating intelligence of its first-time director, Henry Hobson, Maggie is a bit of a drag.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Scott Tobias
    Zathura: A Space Adventure
    Director Jon Favreau, who dipped profitably into family entertainment with 2003's "Elf," effectively recreates the illustrative universe of a good children's book, but he's stuck with a story that noisily grinds its gears.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Scott Tobias
    After the Life
    Doesn't function nearly as well as a standalone piece, mainly because it's stuck with the thankless task of mopping up after the other two.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Scott Tobias
    In a World...
    The film is often a rough, searching, unfocused piece of work, but at a minimum, it affirms Bell as a talent to watch both as an actress and a writer-director, one with a strong, developing comedic sensibility.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Scott Tobias
    Affliction
    Schrader has always been better as a writer and a critic than as a dramatist, which is why his most successful work has either been published in film journals or directed by Martin Scorsese. His flat, awkward staging diminishes some good performances -- particularly those of Nolte and a welcome Sissy Spacek.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Sweet Home Alabama
    The film does coast along smoothly to the inevitable, which is a credit to the always-game Reese Witherspoon, who's courteous enough to pretend she doesn't know what's coming, then make it look like a huge surprise.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Scott Tobias
    Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow
    A documentary that focuses rigorously on process and atmosphere at the expense of context and engagement.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Scott Tobias
    Painted Fire
    In the scope of things, Ohwon's story is a route into the larger story of an uncertain and tumultuous period in Korea, and it's here that Chi-hwa-seon loses its grip.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Scott Tobias
    Up and Down
    Sags into a dreary, humorless family melodrama.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Scott Tobias
    Tracks
    Without the landscape or the heroine expressing themselves particularly sharply, Tracks is just a taciturn young woman wandering through the desert for months. In other words, a slog.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    You, Me & Tuscany
    It’s a piece of escapism that can’t escape from itself.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Scott Tobias
    The Hunting Ground
    If the purpose of The Hunting Ground is to raise awareness and call viewers to action, then mission accomplished. But the tactics used are often graceless and propagandistic, and take away from the moving testimonials and the on-the-ground organization at the film’s core.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation
    Tartakovsky’s instincts are to keep the action moving quickly and let one piece of kid-friendly slapstick tumble into the next, but when the jokes are this consistently uninspired, it doesn’t matter how fast they’re dispensed.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Life or Something Like It
    A banal message movie.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Scott Tobias
    Pain & Gain
    Bay blankets the film in a tone of smug self-awareness that obscures everything but its bald hypocrisy.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Scott Tobias
    Before the Rains
    The one appealing aspect of Before The Rains is that there are no villains, just three characters who are driven first by shared desires, then by a natural impulse for self-preservation that brings them into conflict.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Scott Tobias
    This So-Called Disaster: Sam Shepard Directs the Late Henry Moss
    The scattered insights in This So-Called Disaster aren't worth the sifting it takes to find them.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Scott Tobias
    A Very Long Engagement
    For all of Audrey Tautou's considerable charm in the title role, Jeunet's need for a well-ordered universe proved as suffocating and exhausting as being trapped on an amusement-park ride.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Scott Tobias
    Standing in the Shadows of Motown
    What should be a momentous occasion instead gets anonymously processed through the Doc-U-Matic, with exhilarating live material cut into a sloppy assemblage of interviews, archival footage, and awkward reenactments.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Alex & Emma
    The movie and the movie-within-a-movie share a chemistry even more awkward than that of their flat-footed leads.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Scott Tobias
    Pistol Opera
    If Pistol Opera turns out to be Suzuki's swan song, instead of just an anticlimactic comeback, no one can claim he didn't go out on his own stubborn terms.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Scott Tobias
    The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai
    Truth be told, Sachiko Hanai is probably an accomplished "pink film"; just don't mistake it for something classier.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Scott Tobias
    Man on the Train
    Though an assured and diverting piece of filmmaking, Man On The Train sags from complacency, rarely breaking its neat construction to animate the friendship with any real warmth and life.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Scott Tobias
    Zombi Child
    The film can feel worked-over and schematic, as if Bonello was too preoccupied with serving the thesis to trust his peerless intuition.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 58 Scott Tobias
    24 City
    Mostly, 24 City falls into the same Jia trap of inadvertently drawing the viewers' gaze past his human subjects and to the poetic images of a country in painful metamorphosis.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 60 Scott Tobias
    Ju-on: The Grudge
    Both too obvious and needlessly complicated, Ju-On juggles several non-chronological chapters based on different characters, ensuring that none of the corpses-to-be make much of an impression.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Scott Tobias
    Secret Ballot
    Pleasing low-key comedy.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Scott Tobias
    The Sea Inside
    When pinned mostly in the man's bedroom, Amenábar's flashier instincts are stifled by a bolted camera and a procession of issue-of-the-week clichés.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Scott Tobias
    Thirteen Conversations About One Thing
    In spite of the uniformly strong performances, 13 Conversations largely factors out human nature, leaving a giant puzzle where each piece is pre-determined to fall into place. In the end, the Sprechers have a movie for people who brag about finishing the New York Times Sunday crossword in pen.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Scott Tobias
    The Armstrong Lie
    There are mysteries and ambiguities aplenty about Armstrong and the current state of professional cycling, but Gibney has trouble accessing them without getting in his own way.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Go
    Escapism of the worst sort, a manipulative exercise in style that preys on the passivity of its characters and its audience. In the end, Go offers little more than the sour, impermanent rush of a pixie stick.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    House of Sand and Fog
    Folds like a house of cards, collapsing under its own flimsy foundation.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Scott Tobias
    Eat Pray Love
    Though Eat Pray Love never loses the sour whiff of unexamined first-world privilege, its heroine does at least immerse herself in different cultures rather than expecting them to adapt to her.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Scott Tobias
    Mommy
    Mommy puts all its personal baggage on the table like Ally Sheedy emptying her purse in The Breakfast Club, and Dolan is to be admired for sharing so much of himself, and doing it with such evident passion. But it isn’t enough for an artist simply to share—he has to shape, too.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Scott Tobias
    Source Code
    Based on its thrillingly fractured first half - not to mention "Moon" in its entirety - Jones seems much smarter than he allows the film to be in the end. It wriggles out of its own intriguing puzzle.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    The Ward
    The Ward feels less indebted to cinema's past than a desperate attempt to keep up with the present. Carpenter has made his approximation of a cheap, twisty, shock-filled modern horror movie, and he has lost all but faint sighs of his minimalist swagger in the process.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Scott Tobias
    Billie Eilish - Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour (Live in 3D)
    Though Hit Me Hard and Soft doesn’t “reinvent” the concert film, as the promotional language promises, Cameron’s mastery with 3D photography does make for an immersive experience, and there are some playful touches, too, like a handheld 3D camera that Eilish often holds in her right hand while the microphone rests in her left.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Scott Tobias
    Hoppers
    Chong seems to intend for an escalating series of comic events that get more giddily absurd as it approaches the climax, but the film loses its soul in the process. Hoppers longs for the quiet beatitude of nature, but it’s just another noisemaker.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 58 Scott Tobias
    Family Portrait in Black and White
    There's no organizing principle in Ivanova's documentary, which unfolds in a ragged, seat-of-the-pants style that mirrors its subject's day-to-day life all too closely. Nenya's flock proves too big for the film to wrangle.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Scott Tobias
    Diary of a Wimpy Kid 2: Rodrick Rules
    The sequel, Diary Of A Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules, isn't motivated to change the formula in the least, but it's ever-so-slightly more palatable, if only for being less of a total spazz.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Scott Tobias
    The Blue Room
    As it settles in, the thrilling chutzpah of The Blue Room’s opening salvo gets lost in the intricate curlicues of the plot, which take away much of its illicit rush.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Scott Tobias
    A Song for Martin
    Starts in one direction, then performs a cruel narrative fake-out, sandwiching together two different movies that are scarcely related.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Scott Tobias
    Always Shine
    With her confident second feature, director Sophia Takal (“Green”) takes on Tinseltown misogyny and the toxic rivalry between friends, but that’s mere prelude to a gonzo meta-fiction that deconstructs itself nearly to death.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Scott Tobias
    The Skyjacker's Tale
    A Skyjacker’s Tale is all in the telling, and Jamie Kastner’s haphazard documentary misses the opportunity to get it right, despite having access to Ali and an impressive assembly of major players from his past.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Scott Tobias
    The Alamo
    Turns into an edited-for-TV version of Sam Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch"--flat, bloodless, and utterly bereft of period grit.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Scott Tobias
    The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz
    It’s a call to action in the form of an adoring profile, which is effective (and affecting) strategy, but narrow, propagandistic filmmaking.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Scott Tobias
    The Great Invisible
    The film is righteous but propagandistic, gearing its considerable insight into the Deepwater disaster and its aftermath into a narrow, prodding call to arms. For a documentary wide-ranging to the point of being diffuse, the last-ditch rallying cry seems entirely out of place. It undermines its own complexity.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 58 Scott Tobias
    Deja Vu
    Rarely have Bruckheimer and Scott been so upfront about insulting people's intelligence.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Scott Tobias
    Army of One
    By the end, even Goodman seems to have lost interest.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Scott Tobias
    Nowhere in Africa
    With sumptuous widescreen photography and a pounding world-music score, the film makes for an absorbing travelogue at best, as pretty as a picture book and just as flat on the surface.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Scott Tobias
    The Woodsman
    While The Woodsman gets the psychological profile right, it fails to make Bacon a man.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Scott Tobias
    Still Alice
    It’s undeniably moving, but straightforward to a fault.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Scott Tobias
    Travelers and Magicians
    Unsurprising tribute to the sweetness of rural dwellers.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 58 Scott Tobias
    Machete
    It's often stylish and exciting, but the pile-up of cool kills, hot bodies, and other unprocessed bits of juvenilia doesn't add up to a good time.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Scott Tobias
    The Embalmer
    Both the actor and the character deserve a better movie, one that might have channeled the latter's desires into more than just a few rote genre thrills.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Scott Tobias
    Predator: Badlands
    Predator: Badlands may be formulaic and a little cutesy, but its relentless crowd-pleasing instincts wear down your defenses. You feel like the Dek to its Thia.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 58 Scott Tobias
    Cat Run
    Words like "smug," "derivative," and "shallow" could all be fairly applied to the film, but as a piece of late-night exploitation, it delivers the violence and nudity with the regularity of an IV drip, and some familiar faces in the cast help class it up.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Scott Tobias
    Horton Hears a Who!
    Just because the live-action Seusses have dialed down expectations doesn't mean that Horton shouldn't aspire to more than time-wasting mediocrity. There are precious childhoods at stake here.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Scott Tobias
    Next Stop Wonderland
    What's good about Next Stop Wonderland -- and nearly good enough to warrant recommendation -- has nothing to do with Anderson's sloppy, disjointed filmmaking, and everything to do with Hope Davis' far more disciplined and appealing lead performance.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Scott Tobias
    Carandiru
    Babenco's hard work is undercut by his squarely theatrical notion of realism: Specifically, how did the touring company for "West Side Story" wind up in such an awful spot?
    • 36 Metascore
    • 50 Scott Tobias
    What Happens in Vegas
    Complain all you want about the affable slobs in Judd Apatow comedies; at least they're not tools.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Scott Tobias
    Next Goal Wins
    Next Goal Wins could stand to go deeper into game strategy, or local customs and living conditions, or any number of personal stories, but the victories it does achieve are enormously satisfying.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Scott Tobias
    The Theory of Everything
    Despite a handsome production and two genuinely brilliant lead performances, The Theory Of Everything stumbles into virtually every pitfall that afflicts biopics about geniuses.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Scott Tobias
    Rain
    Rain lays so much portent on every scene that it becomes ungenerous and morally forbidding, as if each bummed cigarette or leisurely cocktail will lead the family that much closer to oblivion. In this case, the punishment is far greater than the crime.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Scott Tobias
    A Murder in the Park
    As a loaded summary of an important, disquieting chapter in Illinois legal history, A Murder In The Park gets the blood boiling, and suggests a justice system open to manipulation by bad actors.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 42 Scott Tobias
    The Decline of the American Empire
    With nothing at stake dramatically, much less cinematically, Arcand leans heavily on brow-raising repartee to carry the load, but his naked contempt throws a wet blanket over all the frank sexual anecdotes and observations.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Scott Tobias
    Tsotsi
    In trying to find the decency in a killer, the film anxiously accounts for his every misdeed. It's a little like watching "City Of God" morph into "Three Men And A Baby."
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Scott Tobias
    The Devil Wears Prada 2
    The more Frankel and McKenna acknowledge that their fresh-out-of-college heroine is now a seasoned editor in her 40s, the better The Devil Wears Prada 2 gets, not least because it doesn’t have to jettison the upscale fantasies and juicy machinations of Miranda's world entirely. Like Miranda herself at one point in the movie, it’s healthy to spend a little time flying in coach.
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