Ann Hornaday

Born

1960-03-09

Died

2026-10-18

Birthplace

Iowa City, Iowa, USA

Biography

Ann Mills Hornaday (March 9, 1960 – October 18, 2026) was an American film critic at The Washington Post, and author. Born in Iowa City, Iowa, and growing up in Des Moines, Mills attended Smith College, majoring in government; she graduated in 1982. Hornaday moved to New York to become a freelance writer, contributing to Premiere, Us and Ms. magazines; at the latter, she also worked as a researcher and assistant to Gloria Steinem, a role she held from 1983 to 1985. Hornaday began contributing to the "Arts & Leisure" section of The New York Times, eventually going on to become film critic at the Austin American-Statesman in 1995. In 1997 she moved to The Baltimore Sun, then to The Washington Post in 2002, following the retirement of the Post's previous critic Rita Kempley. She has also written features for Working Woman and Self magazine. In 2008, Hornaday was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, with the prize committee citing "her perceptive movie reviews and essays, reflecting solid research and an easy, engaging style." In 2017, Hornaday published Talking Pictures: How to Watch Movies, a 304-page text published with Basic Books, that draws on a series Hornaday began writing in 2009 for the Post, aimed at explaining the various specialized crafts in filmmaking — like sound, editing, cinematography — to a general audience. Hornaday approached it as a journalistic project, interviewing people working in a variety of roles in film to ask them to describe what they do as well as "what they wished audiences appreciated more about their work". In a review for The New York Times, Lisa Schwarzbaum described the book as "a pleasantly calm, eminently sensible, down-the-middle primer for the movie lover — amateur, professional or Twitter-centric orator — who would like to acquire and sharpen basic viewing skills." Before her death in October 2026, Hornaday had completed a book about the production of All the President's Men (1976), a film she called a metonym for the Watergate scandal, in which "that from the moment it opened seemed to fuse seamlessly with private memory and collective myth." It is tentatively scheduled to be released in 2028.