Scott Tobias

Released just two weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks — which prompted Roger Ebert, in a one-star review, to offer it as a reason why Americans are hated in some parts of the world (he later apologized) — Ben Stiller's Zoolander found a country in no mood to ...

It sounds like the worst sort of date-night compromise, like some terrible aesthetic treaty between a couple that fights over DVR space for Downton Abbey and The Walking Dead. And yet Seth Grahame-Smith's genre mashup Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was released to mostly kind reviews and robust sales, launching ...

Squeeze through the wormhole that is Jacob Gentry's indie sci-fi movie Synchronicity and nothing looks much different on the other side, just faint echoes of the past. In fact, the film could double as a metaphor for itself, a time machine constructed entirely of used components, with so little distance ...

"Country's got to figure this [expletive] out, Amahl," growls a CIA security contractor to his Libyan translator on his way out of town in 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, Michael Bay's account of the 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound. That's about the level of sophistication the ...

Over 16 seasons and 368 episodes as prosecutor Jack McCoy on Law & Order, the workaday artistry of Sam Waterston was easy to take for granted, like the foundation to an especially durable piece of architecture. Such are the consequences of being part of "What's on?" for such a long ...

Depending on your perspective, Quentin Tarantino's career either comes full circle or spins its wheels with The Hateful Eight, a three-hour Western pastiche that combines the single-setting theatricality of his first feature, Reservoir Dogs, with the explosive Civil War politics of his last, Django Unchained. As cinema's reigning pastiche artist, ...

The worst part of Michael Moore's landmark documentary Roger & Me is Roger and me, because it's an act of pure political theater. Donning what would become his signature working-class costume — rumpled button-down shirt, blue jeans, tennis shoes, ballcap — Moore ambles into General Motors headquarters, requesting a meeting ...

Seafaring adventures like In the Heart of the Sea do not benefit from gravitas any more than a vessel benefits from extra weight in the cargo hold. They are about white squalls, rope burns, cracked hulls, torn sails, men overboard, malevolent sea creatures, and water water everywhere and not a ...

Answering one kind of madness with another, Spike Lee's Chi-Raq approaches the plague of gun violence in Chicago with a staggering disregard for propriety. Just the title alone — a reference to a fatality rate that's exceeded that of American soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan over the same period ...

After nabbing the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 2010—besting a pair of Cannes favorites in A Prophet and the Palme D'Or-winning The White Ribbon—the Argentinian thriller The Secret in Their Eyes enjoyed a hugely successful run in U.S. arthouses. For foreign language films, $1 million is generally considered ...

The Coopers have a gorgeous kitchen. And since it's Christmastime, those granite countertops are lined end to end with magazine-ready displays of food: fresh chocolate pastries, fluffy mashed potatoes, brilliant red tomatoes, a shimmering glazed ham with pineapple slices. The extended family gathers only once a year under the same ...

In movies, cancer tends to be more device than disease, a way of preserving a romance for the ages (e.g. Love Story, A Walk To Remember) or delivering people to a better place through the withering of a beatific martyr. There's a shred of the latter in Miss You Already, ...

Back in 1993, D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus' documentary The War Room made political celebrities out of James Carville and George Stephanopoulos, two of the masterminds behind Bill Clinton's underdog bid for the presidency in 1992. A decade later, director Rachel Boynton caught up with Carville for another documentary, Our ...

"Something's happening on the Internet," yelps Kimber to her shy older sister Jerrica Benton, the instant pop sensation known as "Jem," in the live-action version of Christy Marx's mid-'80s cartoon staple Jem and the Holograms. Kimber is delighting over an acoustic video gone viral, but the line aptly describes the ...

The title of Guillermo Del Toro's luxuriant gothic romance, Crimson Peak, refers to the viscous red clay that burbles to the surface at an isolated British estate — which, in the wintertime, looks like the landscape itself is bleeding out. That Del Toro, the genre maestro behind The Devil's Backbone, ...

"Sometimes, friends begin as enemies. And sometimes, enemies begin as friends. Sometimes, in order to truly know how things end, we must first know how they begin."

So opens the storybook narration to Pan, the calamitous live-action expansion of J.M. Barrie's Neverland mythos. And so does the film commit its ...

In their absence, the twin towers have occupied such a significant place in the American conscience, it can be easy to forget they were once considered a blight on the landscape. "Like two file cabinets," snorts one New Yorker in The Walk, Robert Zemeckis' exhilarating film about Philippe Petit, the ...

Students who experience traumatic events while growing up in poor, turbulent neighborhoods could be considered disabled, a federal judge has ruled in a high-profile case involving the Compton, Calif., schools.

The ruling from U.S. District Judge Michael W. Fitzgerald, released on Wednesday, involves a class-action lawsuit filed against the Compton ...

When horror auteur Eli Roth broke into the mainstream with Hostel in 2005, he tapped into a primal fear among Americans, post-9/11, that foreign countries were inhospitable to yankees abroad. (The clever, double-meaning title could be read as "hostile.") He also helped open the floodgates for the hard-R subgenre known ...

Without a second's hesitation, Alex Ross Perry's Queen of Earth dives right into its heroine's lowest moment, in medias res. The camera stays close to Catherine's face, as smears of mascara frame eyes alight with pain, anger and exhaustion; this has been going on a while and we're just seeing ...