Scott Tobias

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For 1,914 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 1914
  2. Mixed: 722 out of 1914
  3. Negative: 217 out of 1914
1914 movie reviews
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    • 30 Metascore
    • 50 Scott Tobias
    Seventh Son
    The film is overstuffed, but it’s swift and unpretentious, barreling through a non-stop series of action setpieces without pausing too long to take a breath. The busyness doesn’t eradicate the clichés, much less enrich the film emotionally or thematically, but there’s no time to think about them when Bodrov and his screenwriters, Charles Leavitt and Steven Knight, are moving along to the next sensation. It’s transporting in that sense, and that sense alone.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Scott Tobias
    1971
    To her credit, Hamilton lays out their story cleanly and with no small amount of tension, all while drawing strong connections to Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, and the Edward Snowden case.
    • 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
    The Loft
    Whatever fun there might be in the guesswork is wiped away by the realization that Van Looy has made a puzzle for a puzzle’s sake, to no discernible thematic end.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    Black or White
    The trouble with Black Or White is that it feels reverse-engineered, as if Binder wanted to deliver one big statement about race, and rigged an entire movie to make that possible.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Scott Tobias
    Timbuktu
    Timbuktu’s delicate tone is totally unexpected and specific to Sissako, who keeps finding notes of vulnerability.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Everly
    At the most basic level—and this is as basic as movies get—Everly delivers exactly what it promises, though as with most American films with sex and violence, the emphasis is heavily weighted toward the latter.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 20 Scott Tobias
    Mortdecai
    Mortdecai’s farcical mechanics are actually well worked out, which is a credit to Koepp, an ace Hollywood screenwriter (Jurassic Park, 2002’s Spider-Man) who directed the fun late-summer sleeper Premium Rush two years ago. It’s just the jokes that are astonishingly unfunny.
    • 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.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Manny
    Though co-directed by Leon Gast, who made the exceptional “Rumble In The Jungle” documentary When We Were Kings, Manny stays entirely on the surface of Pacquiao’s life and of a sport that’s rife with dirty dealing and chicanery.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Scott Tobias
    The Duke of Burgundy
    What makes The Duke Of Burgundy so affecting is how deftly Strickland and his remarkable actresses bring something as exotic as lesbian S&M into the realm of the ordinary and relatable. Viewers can see themselves in Cynthia and Evelyn, whether they’re hand-washing each other’s undergarments or not.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Scott Tobias
    Play
    Little about [Östlund’s] work is simple-minded or cut-and-dried. His films marinate in viewer discomfort.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Scott Tobias
    Involuntary
    Beyond theme, however, these stories are united by the agonizing, low-level tension Östlund brings to bear on every scene, which vary in importance, but not in consequences for the characters involved.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Scott Tobias
    Blackhat
    Though the pacing is lumpy, to say the least, Blackhat occasionally bursts to life when Mann breaks out one of his signature action setpieces, which have the distinct pop of heavy artillery and the immediacy of video.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Stretch
    It’s a backhanded sort of praise to say Stretch is a movie that goes nowhere fast.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Loitering with Intent
    The film’s sketchy conception is a telling sign that Martin, Godere, and director Adam Rapp have nothing particularly funny or insightful to say about the creative process.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Scott Tobias
    Predestination
    There’s a clarity to Snook’s emotional journey that’s absent from the rest of the film—a fact that’s partly deliberate, since Heinlein and the Spierigs mean to dive into the soup. But amid the murky genre experimentation, it’s a beacon of truth.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Scott Tobias
    When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism
    For all the formidable intellect that went into its conceit, When Evening Falls On Bucharest has a slightness that isn’t helped much by the weight of the discussion, which occasionally presses it into a flat soufflé. But Porumboiu’s insight into the filmmaking process itself is often fascinating.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Scott Tobias
    Leviathan
    Leviathan itself feels like a brave, lonely act of rebellion against the system, deeply pessimistic about the possibility of it ever working in the people’s favor. It advocates for a stiff drink.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Scott Tobias
    Selma
    DuVernay stages well-known public events like the “Bloody Sunday” march with scrupulousness, scope, and a gut-wrenching visceral power. But Selma’s true success is as a chamber piece, not a thundering historical epic.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Scott Tobias
    The Gambler
    Wyatt is a supremely confident filmmaker. His style is multitudes sleeker than Reisz’s original, but his eclectic taste, particularly in the soundtrack, reveals a true connection to the earlier era.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Scott Tobias
    Winter Sleep
    This isn’t merely about the follies of a misanthrope, it’s an epic tragedy about life in the Ivory Tower and the inability to understand—much less empathize with—other human beings.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    We Are the Giant
    One of the problems with We Are The Giant is that not all the stories carry equal weight, both in terms of effectiveness and in the sheer amount of time Barker spends on them.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Scott Tobias
    Wild
    Cheryl is a thoroughly realized, warts-and-all character, and the flashbacks contribute to that. But like their heroine, the filmmakers do some fumbling to get to their destination.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Scott Tobias
    Still Alice
    It’s undeniably moving, but straightforward to a fault.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Scott Tobias
    The Babadook
    It would be enough for The Babadook to get by on scares alone—the eponymous spook is eminiently franchise-able—but Kent doesn’t give the audience that kind of distance. Her agenda is more personal.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Scott Tobias
    The Imitation Game
    The constant in The Imitation Game is Benedict Cumberbatch’s terrific performance as Turing, which has much in common with his delightfully mercurial Sherlock Holmes, but with an underpinning of repressed emotion and quiet despair.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Penguins of Madagascar
    What Penguins Of Madagascar needs is a roomful of ruthless editors to take jokes out of the script, particularly the ones aimed at pleasing the grown-ups in the audience.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Scott Tobias
    Bad Hair
    Rondón treats her characters with toughness and empathy, without devising easy outs or slipping into sentimentality.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Drug Lord: The Legend of Shorty
    Save for the vague aura of danger surrounding Guzmán—which palpably engulfs the filmmakers as they get deeper into the cartel’s “Golden Triangle”—Drug Lord has trouble forming a coherent point of view.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Scott Tobias
    Life Partners
    Fogel and Lefkowitz go for a loose, funny vibe that allows them the freedom to serve a range of different characters and subplots, but the center of their movie doesn’t hold.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Jessabelle
    Director Kevin Greutert, who cut his teeth on the Saw series (editing the first five and directing Saw VI and Saw 3D), whips up some generic Louisiana atmosphere, but his PG-13 shock effects are ineffectual, and he’s eventually given over entirely to a story that twists into melodramatic knots. The takeaway from all this: Sometimes less is more.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Scott Tobias
    Why Don't You Play in Hell?
    Alternately exhilarating and tedious, Why Don’t You Play In Hell? is Sono’s tribute to moviemaking—specifically an elegy to 35mm film, though the tone could hardly be called mournful.
    • 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.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Scott Tobias
    Nightcrawler
    There’s a scolding tone to Nightcrawler that runs counter to its pulp energy, as if Gilroy is telling the audience to be alarmed by the things that turn them on. But much as Gilroy tries to be his own killjoy, Gyllenhaal’s wickedness prevails.
    • 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.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Ouija
    The most pressing issue with Ouija is that Stiles and Snowden cannot seem to write a single interesting line of dialogue. They volley between conversational banalities and whatever exposition might be needed to get the film to its next scary setpiece.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Revenge of the Green Dragons
    In Lau and Loo’s telling, the off-the-boat indoctrination of young, undocumented Chinese families into vicious gangsterism is overstated and cartoonish, like The Warriors trying to pass itself off as a docudrama.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Scott Tobias
    Citizenfour
    Poitras fashions Citizenfour into a spy thriller whose intrigues bleed into everyday life. She doesn’t want the audience to feel like Snowden’s revelations are limited to him and potential enemies of the state—or even to activist journalists like her and Greenwald. She makes the threat feel as pervasive as they believe it to be.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Scott Tobias
    Force Majeure
    Östland writes the conflict between husband and wife beautifully, like a scab that gets picked at until it bleeds, and he does things cinematically, too, to suggest the growing distance between them—an already-cool visual palette broadens like a yawning chasm.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    The Best of Me
    It’s a case study on how the quality of screen partners is only as good as the quality of the romantic obstacles separating them.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
    Alejandro González Iñárritu is a pretentious fraud, but it’s taken some time to understand the precise nature of his fraudulence.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Scott Tobias
    Listen Up Philip
    Listen Up Philip doesn’t care to be liked. And in that, it deserves to be loved.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Scott Tobias
    Felony
    Edgerton may write himself out of the problem too easily, but at least the problem itself is fascinating to consider.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 20 Scott Tobias
    The Devil's Hand
    There’s a good horror movie to be made about how the insularity of the Amish could stoke paranoia and fear—and obscure the truth and forbid outside perspective—under these circumstances, but The Devil’s Hand doesn’t have more than a casual interest in Amish rituals and traditions.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    Dracula Untold
    Dracula Untold boldly attempts to retell the Dracula origin story by sinking its teeth into Bram Stoker’s novel and draining it of all the passion, sensuality, and ambience that have seduced readers and moviegoers since the turn of the 20th century.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Open Windows
    Vigalondo is shooting for something densely layered, an expression of the complexity and moral murkiness of the hacker sphere, but he doesn’t have the plot sorted out.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    ABCs of Death 2
    The shorts in The ABCs Of Death 2 are wholly forgettable, and leave the limits of the gimmicky conceit completely exposed.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Scott Tobias
    The Overnighters
    The thrill of The Overnighters is in witnessing a heartrending payoff that could not be anticipated nor written—and, miraculously, closes the movie on a perfect irony.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Scott Tobias
    The Good Lie
    The small grace of The Good Lie, from Monsieur Lazhar director Philippe Falardeau, is that it fully recognizes the problem of telling stories of black hardship through the prism of white charity, and does everything it can to avoid those pitfalls.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 10 Scott Tobias
    Men, Women & Children
    To borrow a phrase from Patton Oswalt’s bit on a particularly monstrous fast-food creation, the film is “a failure pile in a sadness bowl.”
    • 61 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    Harmontown
    The impression left by Harmontown is that the podcast and the tour are feeding the beast, worsening a pathology that casts him as the “mayor” of whatever stage he happens to be occupying at the moment.
    • 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.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    The Equalizer
    Say this for The Equalizer: It gets the job done, and that job, to quote A Clockwork Orange, is delivering a little of the old ultra-violence.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Scott Tobias
    Art and Craft
    Cullman and Grausman extend a lot of sympathy to this strange, lonely, sick man as he goes about his business. But perhaps he’d been better left alone.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Reclaim
    By trying to have it both ways—goosing up black-market trafficking for cheap thrills, while posing as being sincere about a real global scourge—the film winds up stuck in the middle.
    • 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.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Scott Tobias
    The Guest
    Wingard’s direction is a robust throwback to the VHS gorefests of yore, but with a distinctly more modern slickness and snap, and he knows how to play around with the audience.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Scott Tobias
    Stray Dogs
    Stray Dogs evokes the whole of Tsai’s filmography, but also pays off his collaboration with Lee, who shows a side of himself that’s been hidden away for all these years.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    The Identical
    Even allowing The Identical its premise, the reframing of the Elvis myth as a wholesome example of following God’s plan is not as inspirational as the film seems to believe. Rock fantasies are rarely this milquetoast.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Scott Tobias
    Wetlands
    German director David Wnendt and his co-writer, Claus Falkenberg, are determined to package one teenager’s unhygienic coming-of-age into a slick, funny, accessible romantic comedy. They mostly pull it off.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    The November Man
    The November Man doesn’t pause for a moment’s breath, which tightens up the action at the expense of clarity, character development, wit, politics, themes, subtext, and all the other things that can go into a thriller besides bang-bang and crash-crash.
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