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 0.7 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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    • 77 Metascore
    • 63 Ann Hornaday
    The Promised Land
    What begins as an intriguing visit to a forbidding but fascinating past becomes the kind of perfunctorily moralistic fairy tale that Kahlen himself might scoff at, before getting back to work. Like the wilderness it depicts, this is a movie that ultimately might not want to be tamed.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 100 Ann Hornaday
    Origin
    Origin, Ava DuVernay’s audacious, ambitious adaptation of the equally audacious and ambitious book “Caste,” operates on so many levels at once that the effect is often dizzyingly disorienting. But hang in there: Viewers who allow themselves to be taken on this wide-ranging, occasionally digressive journey will emerge not just edified but emotionally wrung out and, somehow, cleansed.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Ann Hornaday
    The Zone of Interest
    On the most surface level, “The Zone of Interest,” which Glazer adapted from Martin Amis’s novel, is about denial and Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil. But the mental contortions Rudolf and Hedwig go through to justify their own monstrosity go beyond obliviousness into something far more insidious and timeless.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Ann Hornaday
    All of Us Strangers
    Its elegiac themes might make All of Us Strangers sound like a bummer, when it’s anything but. This is an intriguing, increasingly mystifying rabbit hole disguised as a romantic drama, with all the sensuous pleasures the genre suggests (not to mention some superfun synth-pop cuts from Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Pet Shop Boys).
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Ann Hornaday
    American Fiction
    American Fiction would be an enormously entertaining and observant comedy even if it just stuck to the hilarious, if cringey, lengths to which the White establishment will go in the name of psychic safety and self-protection. But Jefferson overlays the story’s most biting wit with layers of warmth, sadness and discovery that make this movie far more than the sum of its parts.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 75 Ann Hornaday
    Fallen Leaves
    Fallen Leaves casts an irresistible spell, one that’s as playful as it is full of longing and pathos.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 88 Ann Hornaday
    Poor Things
    Because McNamara wrote the script, Poor Things brims with his signature polished, sophisticated humor; because Lanthimos directed, it’s full of envelope-pushing zaniness and self-amusement, especially when it comes to Bella’s increasingly uninhibited sexual appetites.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 100 Ann Hornaday
    Maestro
    It's a love story as unruly, passionate and expansive as the flawed and fascinating people at its center. Bravi.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Ann Hornaday
    The Disappearance of Shere Hite
    As regrettable as Hite's fate was, The Disappearance of Shere Hite goes a long way toward rectifying the wrongs done to her, whether in the name of erasure, ridicule, or willful misunderstanding.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Ann Hornaday
    Saltburn
    If Fennell doesn't quite stick the landing -- if her story of striving, sexual obsession, class resentment and revenge ultimately feels puny and predictable -- she certainly has fun getting there.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 37 Ann Hornaday
    Napoleon
    We don't need another hero, but when it comes to the man at its center, Napoleon could have used a lot more oomph.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 88 Ann Hornaday
    Dream Scenario
    Nicolas Cage goes delightfully, derangedly meta in Dream Scenario, a smart, dizzyingly entertaining horror-comedy that morphs into scathing social satire.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 75 Ann Hornaday
    All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt
    All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt doesn’t just announce a promising new talent in Jackson. It serves as a shimmering, dreamlike reminder that movies are as good for poetry as for prose.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 50 Ann Hornaday
    Priscilla
    For all its feminist pretense as a parable of empowerment, Priscilla’s still caught in a trap, even when the heroine can — and does — walk out.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Ann Hornaday
    The Holdovers
    Filmed in subdued tones of burnished browns, The Holdovers might best be described as the movie version of that favorite pair of corduroys that miraculously still fit: stylish, if a little worn in places, softened by time and made more generous by the life lived inside them.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Ann Hornaday
    Anatomy of a Fall
    If it sometimes feels a bit contrived, and if its conclusion will leave some viewers unsatisfied, Triet has made a film that succeeds brilliantly — on terms that are as exacting, rigorous and precise as her unflappable heroine.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Ann Hornaday
    Nyad
    Despite its over-credulous willingness to go along on what through one lens amounts to a massive ego trip, Nyad manages to be a celebration of perseverance, self-belief and learning how to be loved.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 75 Ann Hornaday
    Killers of the Flower Moon
    There’s no doubt that Killers of the Flower Moon reflects a shift in energy that is defensible — even necessary — from an ethical point of view. Narratively, that pivot results in a film that, it must be said, feels leeched of the energy and vigor viewers associate with Scorsese at his most exhilarating.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Ann Hornaday
    Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour
    After years of dabbling, lyrically and literally, Taylor Swift has come for American cinema, and we can only wait for her next move.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 100 Ann Hornaday
    Joan Baez I Am A Noise
    Throughout the film, it’s Baez who holds the audience spellbound, not just in live performances that remained transfixing from the late 1950s to the 2010s, but in her very being.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 63 Ann Hornaday
    She Came to Me
    She Came to Me exists in between things: airy romance and psychological depth; operatic fantasy and gritty reality; farce and fatalism. Writer-director Rebecca Miller executes that balancing act with lighthearted audacity in a film that aspires, with fitful success, to resurrect the lost art of screwball comedy — with some literal opera thrown in for musical measure.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 88 Ann Hornaday
    Flora and Son
    Propelled by a funny, charismatic turn by Hewson (who infused such unpredictable energy in the terrific Apple TV Plus series “Bad Sisters”), Flora and Son is a feel-good movie that largely earns its sentimental uplift, one sick burn and soaring musical number at a time.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 88 Ann Hornaday
    Scrapper
    Regan directs Scrapper with exceptional verve, interrupting the narrative with witty documentarylike asides whose framing evokes the poppy aesthetic of Wes Anderson.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Ann Hornaday
    A Haunting in Venice
    A Haunting in Venice isn’t exactly a barrel of laughs. But that’s no doubt as intended by Branagh, who seems intent on rescuing Poirot from the reassuring, too-cute world of “cozy” mysteries and grounding him in the real-life loss and emotional dislocation of the postwar eras from which he sprang.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 88 Ann Hornaday
    The Eternal Memory
    Filmed in Augusto and Pauli’s handsome brick-and-timber home in Chile, and punctuated by home movies and news footage of Augusto in his prime, The Eternal Memory mostly eschews voyeurism for its own maudlin sake.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Ann Hornaday
    Landscape with Invisible Hand
    With the exception of a few choice words from Haddish, Landscape With Invisible Hand lacks the kind of steady humor and energy that would otherwise keep the story afloat.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 88 Ann Hornaday
    Passages
    Smart, sensuous and stylish, Passages is all about pleasure: the giving of it, the getting of it, the art and pursuit of it, and what it all can cost.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Ann Hornaday
    Kokomo City
    Kokomo City, D. Smith’s impressive debut documentary about Black trans sex workers, arrives in time to be an audacious, endearing, illuminating, often amusingly ribald primer.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Ann Hornaday
    Afire
    Richly observed and paced with relaxed, unforced ease, Afire doesn’t ignite as much as smolder. It’s a slow, steady burn.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Ann Hornaday
    Oppenheimer
    As a filmmaker at the height of his powers, Nolan has used those prodigious skills, not simply to amaze or spectacularize, but to plunge the audience into a chapter of history that might feel ancient, as he reminds us, but happened just yesterday. By making that story so beautiful, so elegantly crafted and compulsively watchable, he has brought to life not just J. Robert Oppenheimer, but the still-crucial arguments he both started and tried to end.
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