Ann Hornaday

Ann Mills Hornaday was born on 9 March 1960 in Iowa City, Iowa, and was adopted at birth by William R. Hornaday Jr., a urologist, and his wife, the former Mary Mills, who was active in civic and charitable work. She grew up in Des Moines with a brother, William Hornaday III. Iowa remained part of her identity; her own online biography described her as a Baltimorean by way of Iowa, New York City and Austin.

Hornaday attended Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she majored in government and graduated cum laude in 1982. In a 2019 interview with the college she recalled a very politically engaged time of teach-ins, knocking on doors, leafleting and marching against nuclear proliferation and the war in El Salvador, and said she worked passionately for political and social justice causes. She stayed close to the college all her life and was for years the featured guest at a gathering of Smith alumnae in the Washington area before the Academy Awards.

After Smith, Hornaday joined Ms. magazine in New York as a researcher and personal assistant to its co-founder, Gloria Steinem, a role biographer Carolyn Heilbrun dates to 1983 through 1985. Steinem encouraged her writing. She then freelanced in New York for several years, writing for the Arts and Leisure section of The New York Times, Premiere, Us, Ms., Working Woman and Self.

In 1995 the Austin American-Statesman hired her as its film critic; she later said she thought the paper was drawn to her reporting skills. In 1997 she moved to The Baltimore Sun as movie critic, staying until 2000. She joined The Washington Post in 2002 after the retirement of critic Rita Kempley and became its chief film critic in 2012. Over more than 20 years she wrote hundreds of reviews, in-depth profiles and essays, and interviewed filmmakers at festivals and public events. She was a regular reviewer for the PBS NewsHour and appeared often on Tony Kornheiser's radio program.

From 2009 she wrote a Post series demystifying film crafts such as sound, editing and cinematography, which became her book Talking Pictures: How to Watch Movies (Basic Books, 2017). After a year away from regular reviewing she returned in April 2025, and in the summer of 2025 she accepted a buyout and left the Post, one of a wave of senior departures from the paper.

Hornaday judged a film by three questions: what was the artist trying to achieve, did they achieve it, and was it worth achieving? She wrote from the viewpoint of an engaged moviegoer rather than a cinema scholar and was not a snob about popular film. Her favourites were deeply American: Casablanca (1942), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), which she said checks every box in terms of a well-crafted, beautiful film, Sweet Smell of Success (1957) and the 1967 romantic comedy Two for the Road. She admired This Is Spinal Tap, Goodfellas and Thelma and Louise, and did not care for Forrest Gump or The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

She called The Hurt Locker (2009) the best film she ever reviewed and named 2007 as the best year in film history. She praised Oppenheimer (2023) as a film of magnitude, profundity and dazzling artistry, while calling Barbie, released the same summer, a hot-pink mess of a movie. She was among the first critics to champion Tom McCarthy, Ryan Coogler, Greta Gerwig and Alexander Payne, and producers such as Albert Berger praised her for spreading credit beyond the people in the spotlight to the whole collaborative team.

Hornaday made her home in Baltimore after joining The Baltimore Sun in 1997 and lived there for the rest of her life. She was married for 26 years to Dennis Greenia; they had a daughter, Victoria Greenia, and she was stepmother to Leila Greenia. She was a parishioner and Sunday school teacher at the Episcopal Cathedral of the Incarnation in Baltimore.

A cradle Episcopalian, Hornaday rarely professed her faith in print, a reticence she put down to both denomination and profession. In her April 2014 Post essay, Confessions of a Christian film critic, written after a reader castigated her review of Son of God, she described the tensions, contradictions and fleeting moments of grace she experienced as a film critic who was also a practising Christian. Her criticism consistently returned to film as a cultural touchstone with an outsize place in the nation's collective memory, and to the representation of women on and off screen.

On 25 May 2014 Hornaday published a column on the final YouTube video of Elliot Rodger, who killed six people near the University of California, Santa Barbara, before taking his own life. She argued that his grievances echoed Hollywood fantasies of vigilantism and sexual wish-fulfilment and mentioned the comedy Neighbors and the films of Judd Apatow. Seth Rogen and Apatow responded angrily on social media. Two days later she published a follow-up column and video saying she had by no means meant to blame those films for the killings, but that it bears asking what the costs are of having such a narrow range of stories.

Tributes after her death stressed her warmth, rigour and fairness. Executive editor Matt Murray said reading her work was like talking with a close, if much more knowledgeable, friend, and former executive editor Martin Baron said cheap shots were never in her portfolio. Critic and editor Joshua Rothkopf called her a stylish and fearless film critic who taught him a lot about what the job should be. Talking Pictures remains a widely used primer for viewers who want to understand how films are made, and her book on the making of All the President's Men is tentatively scheduled to be published in 2028.

Hornaday was a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, cited for her perceptive movie reviews and essays, reflecting solid research and an easy, engaging style. She was a member of the National Society of Film Critics.

Books: Talking Pictures: How to Watch Movies (Basic Books, 2017, 304 pages). A book on the filming of All the President's Men was completed shortly before her death and is tentatively scheduled for 2028.

Broadcast: regular film reviewer for the PBS NewsHour, frequent guest on The Tony Kornheiser Show, and interviewer at many festival and public conversations, including talks with Alexander Payne, Peter Landesman, Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal.

Ann Hornaday died on 18 October 2026 at her home in Baltimore, Maryland, aged 66. Her husband, Dennis Greenia, said the cause was glioblastoma, a form of brain cancer. The Washington Post published her obituary, by Matt Schudel, on 19 October 2026. Funeral and burial arrangements had not been made public at the time of writing.