Ann Hornaday

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Baltimore Sun, Washington Post
For 2,056 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 49% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 49% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 0.6 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Ann Hornaday's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 66
Highest review score: 100 The Tragedy of Macbeth
Lowest review score: 0 Orphan
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,363 out of 2056
  2. Mixed: 375 out of 2056
  3. Negative: 318 out of 2056
2056 movie reviews
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per page
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Ann Hornaday
    Ma Rainey's Black Bottom
    Wolfe keeps the production simple, albeit with attractively rich visual values and gorgeous costumes, allowing the performances to exert their mesmerizing force. And nowhere is that magnetism more palpable than when Davis and Boseman are going toe to toe, their energies repelling one another one moment and fusing the next.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 100 Ann Hornaday
    Rust and Bone
    Turns out to be one of the most transportingly romantic movies of the year, one that finds the most stirring emotion in struggle rather than in ginned-up melodrama or easy resolution.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Ann Hornaday
    Other People's Children
    There’s a certain kind of French movie that’s a quintessentially French movie: stylish, intellectually engaged, alert to adult emotions and problems. Other People’s Children is that kind of movie — it tells a small-canvas story that loses none of its poignancy for refusing to overreach or give into fatal self-seriousness.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Ann Hornaday
    There Will Be Blood
    A searing, apocalyptic and finally breathtaking drama.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Ann Hornaday
    Last Days in Vietnam
    In Kennedy’s scrupulous, adroit hands, Last Days in Vietnam plays like a wartime thriller, with heroes engaging in jaw- dropping feats of ingenuity and derring do.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 100 Ann Hornaday
    Green Book
    Most winningly, Green Book puts two of the finest screen actors working today in a sexy turquoise Cadillac, letting them loose on a funny, swiftly-moving chamber piece bursting with heart, art and soul.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Ann Hornaday
    Foxcatcher
    Foxcatcher exerts a mesmerizing pull, not only because it affords the chance to witness three fine actors working at the height of their powers, but also because it so steadfastly resists the urge to clutter up empty space with the filigree of gratuitous imagery and chatter.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Ann Hornaday
    Cold War
    A near-perfect film, an artfully crafted, flawlessly acted meditation on love, memory and invented history that’s both deeply personal and politically attuned.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Ann Hornaday
    Being John Malkovich
    This smart, fanciful and brilliantly staged comedy takes a truly one-of-a-kind premise and makes it, of all things, a weirdly profound meditation on consciousness, identity, fame, gender and reality.
    • Baltimore Sun
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Ann Hornaday
    Zero Dark Thirty
    By and large, Zero Dark Thirty dispenses with sentimentality and speculation, portraying the final mission not with triumphalist zeal or rank emotionalism but with a reserved, even mournful sense of ambivalence.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Ann Hornaday
    Stories We Tell
    With its ingenious structure, seamless visual conceits and mordant humor, Stories We Tell is a masterful film on technical and aesthetic values alone. But because of the wisdom and compassion of its maker, it rises to another level entirely.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Ann Hornaday
    The Worst Person in the World
    Trier and Reinsve have gifted audiences with a movie that understands the ecstasy of diving into the unknown, the flush of new love, the beauty of connecting amid unspeakable loss.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Ann Hornaday
    Manchester by the Sea
    Manchester by the Sea is a film of surpassing beauty and heart. Even at its most melancholy depths, it brims with candid, earnest, indefatigable life.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Ann Hornaday
    The Rider
    Filmed with widescreen grandeur on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, The Rider reinvigorates tropes from the western genre of men, horses, honor codes and vast expanses of nature with a refreshing lack of sentimentality, without sacrificing their inherent lyricism and poetry.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Ann Hornaday
    Two Days, One Night
    As a parable on karma, capitalism and Darwinian corporate politics, Two Days, One Night can often feel brutal. As a testament to connection, service, sacrifice and self-worth, it’s a soaring, heart-rending hymn.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Ann Hornaday
    Fargo
    It's a miracle: A tough, honest, bloody film set so far from the bright lights it feels as if it's on a different planet, yet knowable and absolutely compelling from start to finish.
    • Baltimore Sun
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Ann Hornaday
    The Post
    If the film has an MVP, it’s Bob Odenkirk, who does a splendid and quietly amusing job of playing The Post’s unsung Pentagon Papers hero, assistant managing editor Ben Bagdikian.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Ann Hornaday
    Three Minutes: A Lengthening
    Three Minutes: A Lengthening unspools like a not-so-minor miracle. It’s a work of poetry, power and ruminative grace.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Ann Hornaday
    Nostalgia for the Light
    Gracefully moving between the infinite and the practical, the celestial and the implacably grounded, Guzman has created a sensitive, richly textured portrait of time and place that transcends both those conceits.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Ann Hornaday
    Atonement
    Nothing comes easily in Atonement, especially its ending, which, both happy and tragic, is as wrenching as it is genuinely satisfying. How fitting, somehow, that a novel so devoted to the precision and passionate love of language be captured in a film that is simply too exquisite for words.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Ann Hornaday
    Sugar
    A film of rare intelligence, beauty and compassion.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Ann Hornaday
    Past Lives
    Celine Song makes a quietly spectacular writing-directing debut with Past Lives, a lyrical slow burn of a film that expertly holds back wellsprings of emotion, until it unleashes a deluge.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Ann Hornaday
    No Bears
    No Bears would be thoroughly engaging simply as a wryly funny fish-out-of-water story, with some diverting film-within-a-film metatext thrown in for thoughtful measure. But as Panahi’s stories mirror and merge, his deeper observations come into sobering and ultimately deeply moving focus.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 100 Ann Hornaday
    Julieta
    Whether by dint of his source material or his own maturity, the filmmaker has invested the surface sheen with tenderness and emotional depth. It’s no surprise that Julieta is marvelous to look at, but it possesses just as much substance as style.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 100 Ann Hornaday
    Cold Case Hammarskjöld
    Funny, provocative and chilling, Cold Case Hammarskjold draws the viewer into that helix and manages to be improbably entertaining, even as it becomes increasingly, shockingly uncomfortable. It’s impossible to emerge from this film without being shaken to your core. Mission accomplished: Mind blown.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Ann Hornaday
    You Hurt My Feelings
    As a slice of life spiked with mordant, uncynical humor, it’s deliciously entertaining. In other words, it’s another Holofcener movie, which means it’s perilously close to perfect.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Ann Hornaday
    45 Years
    Haigh knows how to thread a story in a way that makes it feel deliberate and spontaneous, so that when it reaches its climax, viewers feel that it’s both inevitable and utterly devastating.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Ann Hornaday
    20th Century Women
    As a celebration of personal and social history, 20th Century Women takes the audience back. But it also lifts us up on a wave of openhearted emotion and keen intelligence. It bursts with the sad, messy, ungovernable beauty of life.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 100 Ann Hornaday
    About a Boy
    That rare romantic comedy that dares to choose messiness over closure, prickly independence over fetishized coupledom, and honesty over typical Hollywood endings.
    • 98 Metascore
    • 100 Ann Hornaday
    Pan's Labyrinth
    With this film, del Toro seems to have created his manifesto, a tour de force of cautionary zeal, humanism and magic. At this writing, Pan's Labyrinth is the best-reviewed film of 2006 listed on the movie review Web site Metacritic.com, and for a reason: It's just that great.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Ann Hornaday
    The Father
    The Father, ultimately, is a paradox: as nuanced as it is bluntly direct, as tough as it is tender. In its own elegant, confounding, chimerical and compassionate way, it’s a lot like life.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Ann Hornaday
    Never Rarely Sometimes Always
    With empathy and outrage that cut equally deeply, Hittman reminds us: This is a girl’s life in a man’s world.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 100 Ann Hornaday
    As Good as It Gets
    Smart, funny and often viciously cruel, this is a romantic comedy for people who are too old to believe in fairyales but wise enough to accept a happy ending when that's what life gives them.
    • Baltimore Sun
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Ann Hornaday
    Blue Is the Warmest Color
    Hours, even days later, they may find themselves thinking of Adèle and wondering how she’s doing — only then realizing how completely this fictional but very real creation has winnowed her way into their hearts and minds. That’s great acting. It’s great art. And that’s why Blue Is the Warmest Color is a great movie.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Ann Hornaday
    Capturing the Friedmans
    Jarecki has created a tour de force of narrative ambiguity, and in doing so has made one of the most honest reality shows ever.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 100 Ann Hornaday
    Felicia's Journey
    Compulsion, self-deception and the slippery nature of evil are explored with fidelity and supreme control .
    • Baltimore Sun
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Ann Hornaday
    Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan
    The result is a perfect combination of slapstick and satire, a Platonic ideal of high-and lowbrow that manages to appeal to our basest common denominators while brilliantly skewering racism, anti-Semitism, sexism and that peculiarly American affliction: we're-number-one-ism.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 90 Ann Hornaday
    Stuart Little 2
    A wonderful thing to snuggle into, as full of heart and pep and innocence as the title character himself.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 90 Ann Hornaday
    4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
    Anamaria Marinca delivers an utterly transfixing performance as Otilia, a young woman who helps a friend (Laura Vasiliu) obtain an illegal abortion in the waning days of Romania's communist Ceausescu regime.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Ann Hornaday
    Secret Ballot
    As much as any earnest historical drama, Secret Ballot serves as an eloquent argument for civic life, showing its human elements to be no less flawed for being so necessary.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Ann Hornaday
    Mystic River
    If Mystic River is just a bit overplayed, a tad too highly pitched, it still resonates with grief and fury and feeling.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Ann Hornaday
    Ten
    Kiarostami has been hailed as the premier humanist filmmaker at work in a larger Iranian cinematic renaissance, and all his formal signatures are on view here -- the small, intimate canvas, the loose, improvised air of the performances, the absence of an authoritarian directorial hand.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Ann Hornaday
    Slumdog Millionaire
    Like all good fairy tales, this outsize celebration of perseverance and moral triumph contains within it a deeper idea -- in this case, the relative nature of what we think we know, and what's worth knowing at all. No doubt Dickens himself would approve.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Ann Hornaday
    A Mighty Wind
    Guest has proven to be this era's master of humanist satire.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Ann Hornaday
    Soul Power
    Explodes in a burst of energy, musical chops and an eerie political prescience that makes it feel like something beamed from some past-is-future time warp.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 Ann Hornaday
    Bridge to Terabithia
    The news is good for Bridge to Terabithia fans. The beloved children's book has not just survived but thrived in its adaptation to the screen.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Ann Hornaday
    Wattstax (re-released)
    A candid, colorful and deeply meaningful sociocultural time capsule, one that captured the black community at the height of its political energy and optimism.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 Ann Hornaday
    Flushed Away
    Shot through with cheeky wit and hilarious musical numbers by the aforementioned slugs, Flushed Away features an eye-popping boat chase through London's watery nether regions, as well as the winning vocal talent of Kate Winslet, Bill Nighy and Ian McKellen, doing his best Sydney Greenstreet. Well done!
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Ann Hornaday
    Maria Full of Grace
    A gripping, deeply moving film
    • 67 Metascore
    • 90 Ann Hornaday
    Last Days
    Despite all of Van Sant's narrative feints and coy protestations, the audience is left with one searing memory after seeing Last Days, and that memory is of Cobain. Was he, as Gordon's character suggests at one point, simply a rock-and-roll cliche? Or was he a visionary genius, as the name of Pitt's character implies?
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Ann Hornaday
    The Savages
    Bringing a tough, astringent wit to a subject too often wrapped in the cozy blanket of sentimentality or cute humor, Tamara Jenkins takes a frank look at the indignities of aging in The Savages, a black comedy that invites viewers to laugh or at least smile ruefully at the dying of the light.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Ann Hornaday
    United 93
    United 93 unfolds with the terrible inevitability of a modern-day "Battle of Algiers," with Greengrass exerting superb control of tone, structure and pace...United 93 may be the best movie I ever hated.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Ann Hornaday
    Hotel Rwanda
    Magnificent.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Ann Hornaday
    Rabbit-Proof Fence
    Searing dramatization of a story of remarkable courage, stamina and spirit.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 90 Ann Hornaday
    The Wild Thornberrys Movie
    Outstanding entertainment for little ones but just as rewarding for their adult companions.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 90 Ann Hornaday
    Hustle & Flow
    The performances are accomplished, but the real star of Hustle & Flow is Brewer, a playwright who has written and directed a few other movies but who is effectively making a breathtaking national debut here.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Ann Hornaday
    The Triplets of Belleville
    Chomet's vision is singularly strange and somber, and one of enormous originality and promise.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Ann Hornaday
    I'm Going Home
    Viewers who come to this delicate creation with expectations of just another quaint or sad story are in for a surprise.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Ann Hornaday
    Knocked Up
    Turns out to be not just rude, crude and outrageously funny but a deceptively sophisticated meditation on moral agency -- with pot jokes!
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Ann Hornaday
    The Magdalene Sisters
    A stirring, emotionally galvanizing film, not only due to its shattering subject matter but thanks to Mullan's spot-on eye for casting and fluid, uncoercive style.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Ann Hornaday
    Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
    Gromit's every facial move -- every grimace, scowl, eye-roll and glance askance -- is sublime.
    • Washington Post
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Ann Hornaday
    Michael Clayton
    This uncommonly intelligent thriller evokes the great films of the 1970s ("All the President's Men," "Klute," "Three Days of the Condor") that managed to elicit gritty urban realism while maintaining a suave sense of style and moral complexity.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Ann Hornaday
    Donnie Darko: The Director's Cut
    If Kelly felt it necessary to add the new material, that's all to the good. It just means there's more to love.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Ann Hornaday
    Roger Dodger
    Takes both its characters and the audience to the depths, but it's a journey Kidd redeems with wit and fluency and, ultimately, a deeply persistent humanism.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Ann Hornaday
    Talk to Her
    A movie of technical skill and rare depth of intellect and feeling.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Ann Hornaday
    Adventureland
    Thanks to an exceptionally deft touch, Mottola manages to capture the absurdity and anguish of young adulthood, while never sacrificing meaning on the altar of crude humor.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Ann Hornaday
    Hellboy
    Surprisingly smart, graphically faithful live-action adaptation of the Mike Mignola series
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Ann Hornaday
    Boy A
    It's beautiful. I loved it. And it broke my heart.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Ann Hornaday
    Mountain Patrol
    Extraordinary on many levels...because Mountain Patrol instead becomes what might be the first Chinese conservationist spaghetti western ever made.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Ann Hornaday
    Hellboy II: The Golden Army
    As he has done in all his movies, from creature features such as "Mimic" to serious dramas such as "Pan's Labyrinth," del Toro creates unforgettable images, filled with color, texture, lyricism and horror.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Ann Hornaday
    Spellbound
    Just might be the most action-packed suspense thriller of the summer.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Ann Hornaday
    Nobody Knows
    The kids in Nobody Knows are most decidedly not crazy, and we come to care for them to an almost excruciating degree.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Ann Hornaday
    Million Dollar Baby
    The heart of Million Dollar Baby lies in the core relationships among Frankie, Maggie and Scrap, friendships so pure, so genuine, so authentic that it takes actors of Eastwood's, Swank's and Freeman's caliber to sell them in this otherwise cynical world.
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