For 1,922 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 4 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Scott Tobias' Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 62
Highest review score: 100 Hard Boiled
Lowest review score: 0 The Real Cancun
Score distribution:
1922 movie reviews
    • 76 Metascore
    • 100 Scott Tobias
    The film feels as beautifully calibrated as a great piece of short fiction, only with visual accents and emphases filling in for the prose. It's a relationship movie where the most important exchanges remain unspoken.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 58 Scott Tobias
    Luis Prieto's remake capably mimics the original's breakneck energy without adding a single thing. It seems to exist mostly to stuff more violence into Britain's insatiable maw for crime pictures.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 67 Scott Tobias
    The mythology has deepened, largely to the negative, and the formula is as rigid as the fixins of a fast-food sandwich-tastes the same in every city. But the effects are eternally reliable.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Scott Tobias
    Radio Unnameable is at its best when it tries to find some visual analog to Fass' vibe, courtesy of cinematographer John Pirozzi, who takes beautiful snapshots of a sleepless city. It also, in the Fass way, does a little meandering.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 0 Scott Tobias
    The specific problem with Part II is that a second act of huffery and puffery don't get it anywhere.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Scott Tobias
    The truthfulness of Winstead's performance - and those of her co-stars, too - has a steadying influence on James Ponsoldt's modest drama, which at times seems in danger of failing a sobriety test.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Scott Tobias
    For most of the way, right up until a hastily contrived and deeply unsatisfying ending, the film perceptively sketches a fractured identity, a man who enters a new life carrying painful remnants of the old.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 25 Scott Tobias
    Gallagher briefly threatens to turn Smiley into something closer to the hallucinatory psychological horror of "Repulsion," but he retreats to the more conventional twists and jump-scares expected of bottom-of-the-barrel slasher films like this one. This film will not do for the Internet what "Psycho" did for showers - no more computers have to be smashed because of it.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Scott Tobias
    Markevicius tells this incredible yarn through the significantly less exciting format of an ESPN-style documentary, which gets the job done with minimal flourish. Still, he employs former Lithuanian greats like Arvydas Sabonis and Sarunas Marciulionis to serve as guides to the country's past and present, and the basketball culture that's thrived there under the best and worst of times.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 83 Scott Tobias
    It's all done in questionable taste, mucking around in the nasty terrain of snuff films and children in constant peril, but Sinister is smart and well-crafted, and it scarcely gives the audience a moment to breathe.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 10 Scott Tobias
    The words "florid" and "inert" are not quite antonyms, but it would nonetheless seem impossible for those two adjectives to apply to the same thing. And yet here comes The Paperboy, a swamp noir so spectacularly incompetent that even the ripest pulp attractions are left to rot in the sun, flies buzzing lazily around them.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 75 Scott Tobias
    It also, in its best moments, makes horror out of the 21st-century obsession with self-documentation.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 83 Scott Tobias
    In an unusually subtle performance by a child actor, Kacey Mottet Klein stars as a crafty ragamuffin.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Scott Tobias
    There are no laughs in Solomon Kane; the sole attempt at a joke doesn't score, but it's a bracing reminder that humor exists. Instead, Bassett and Purefoy, his charisma-impaired star, get down to the grim, colorless business of vanquishing evil in a world where it settles like a black fog.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 58 Scott Tobias
    Working from a solid template is only half the battle; the other half is filling in the details, and it's here that The House At The End Of The Street goes flat and generic, substituting jump-scares and visual twitchiness for the psychological complexity that might have sold the horror.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Scott Tobias
    Knuckleball! looks and feels like a standard ESPN documentary, slickly packaged and a little bloodless, and Stern and Sundberg lean a little heavily on music to goose up the excitement.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 83 Scott Tobias
    Drawing on a wealth of footage from inside ACT UP meetings and protests, David France's powerful documentary How To Survive A Plague pays tribute to their courage and relentlessness, but it's even better as a record of the tactics of effective activism.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 83 Scott Tobias
    Head Games is particularly devastating when it shifts from the NFL and NHL, where brutality and headshots are a given, to girls' soccer and under-14 football leagues, where still-developing young necks and skulls make kids perhaps more vulnerable to head trauma than their professional counterparts.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Scott Tobias
    It's a feisty, contentious, deliberately misshapen film, designed to challenge and frustrate audiences looking for a clean resolution. Just because it's over doesn't mean it's settled.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 75 Scott Tobias
    In easily her best performance - and sadly, one few will see, given the film's modest release strategy - Jessica Biel stars as a single mother in Cold Rock, Washington.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 83 Scott Tobias
    He's Premium Rush's villain, but Shannon doesn't attempt anything like the austere derangement of a Hans Gruber type, even though he specializes in playing terrifying nutjobs. Instead, he's a buffoon of the first order, and his hapless tomfoolery sets the tone for a light, fast, frequently hilarious 90 minutes.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 33 Scott Tobias
    These are all legitimate concerns, which Navarro supports with testimony from economists, politicians, union leaders, and businesspeople, but they're undermined at every point by a sky-is-falling hysteria that registers as white noise. It's the documentary equivalent of a raving street-corner derelict.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 83 Scott Tobias
    The beauty of the film is how organically its themes are presented - it's a slice of life that comes about its sweeping ideas with surprising delicacy.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 42 Scott Tobias
    The Expendables 2 makes a franchise out of a novelty item, and the nostalgic kick is gone: It's a reminder that most of those '80s actioners were xenophobic and dumb, that many of its stars had more muscle mass than charisma, and that the sight of these old fossils referring to themselves as old fossils is more pathetic than cheekily self-referential.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 33 Scott Tobias
    Director Rob Whitehair doesn't do much to complicate what's essentially a promotional featurette for Wiede and Tucker's Wild Sentry organization, presenting the anti-wolf faction as rabid, irrational, and extreme. But he can't be blamed for wanting to stoke the drama a little: Without it, True Wolf would be a lesson in the care and feeding of an exotic pet.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 50 Scott Tobias
    Slips into the no-man's land between screwball and melodrama, squandering both the comic opportunities of an irrational search for drugs and the raw desperation of a piano prodigy who's held captive by his mother's dysfunction.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 42 Scott Tobias
    With its minimal settings and focus on the abstract lingo of market transactions, "Margin Call" stands as the new model for how to do Wall Street on a budget, embedding its moral themes in language and complex characters. By comparison, $upercapitalist seems naïve about both the market and the humans who operate in it.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 42 Scott Tobias
    Craigslist Joe takes Garner on a 21st-century hitchhiking trip that not only didn't end in his gruesome murder, but in a month to remember fondly. It's an inspiring experience. For him.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 67 Scott Tobias
    Gilroy does the unforgivable by turning out a lean thriller at a fatty 135 minutes, mainly by making the conspiracy plot far more complicated than it needs to be.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 83 Scott Tobias
    Taylor and Frankel go too broad when they try for comic relief - and the on-the-nose soundtrack is borderline criminal - but Hope Springs handles marriage and advanced-age sexuality with a refreshing, down-to-earth candor. In today's Hollywood, that counts as radical.

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