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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    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Ann Hornaday
    Barbie
    Viewers who have nurtured a loving if complicated relationship with Barbie might feel seen by the end of the film. Whether they’ll feel satisfied is another question entirely — especially when it comes to the film’s letdown of an ending, which was no doubt perfect on the page but lands with a deflating, didactic thud. Then again, that gnawing sense of ambivalence was no doubt precisely what Gerwig’s “Barbie” was aiming for.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Ann Hornaday
    Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning
    The good news isn’t just that Dead Reckoning lives up to its star’s notoriously high standards; it’s that it isn’t even over yet.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Ann Hornaday
    No Hard Feelings
    By turns giddily coy and disarmingly frank, the movie doesn’t know if it wants to be a kinder, gentler Apatow or go full Farrelly.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Ann Hornaday
    Chile '76
    Chile ’76 turns out to be a paranoid thriller altogether worthy of the era it captures with such cool, self-contained style.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Ann Hornaday
    Lynch/Oz
    Lynch/Oz possesses undeniable value, if only to remind viewers that cinema is worth dissecting, thinking about, arguing over, mulling around.
    • 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.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Ann Hornaday
    L'Immensità
    L’immensità lives up to its title: It’s a small but all-encompassing portrait of how life feels in a certain time and place — when the broken pieces of one’s true self are invisibly coming together, even when getting them to fit feels too overwhelming to contemplate.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 75 Ann Hornaday
    Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
    It’s just this impressive amalgamation of realism and stylization that allows “Across the Spider-Verse” to transcend its narrative shortcomings: Even at its most obscure or muddled, it’s never less than a pleasure to watch.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Ann Hornaday
    Reality
    Reality isn’t just stranger than fiction: It’s subtler, sadder and exponentially more haunting.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 75 Ann Hornaday
    The Little Mermaid
    Bailey nails the iconic moments (that head toss) and the high notes, but also her character’s combination of spunk and innocence. She delivers a lovely performance that’s all the more accomplished for being delivered amid crashing waves, sweeping vistas and the crushing expectations of generations of fans. As a new generation’s Ariel, she makes The Little Mermaid her own — with confidence, charisma and oceans of charm.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Ann Hornaday
    Fast X
    Next to Momoa, the novelty of Fast X lies mostly in its cameos, which only a spoilsport would describe in more detail; suffice it to say that most work, and the most newsworthy come in the film’s final scenes, including the closing credits. Not surprisingly, Fast X brings new meaning to the term “cliffhanger.” There’s definitely more to come. There always is.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Ann Hornaday
    The Starling Girl
    As a portrait of a young woman testing the limits of the shame-based system that has controlled her, The Starling Girl plays like a warmer, more radiant companion piece to last year’s “Women Talking."
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Ann Hornaday
    R.M.N.
    R.M.N. is as gripping and scrupulously humane as Mungiu’s admirers have come to expect from an artist of supreme discipline and dramatic skill. It’s one thing to be a master of mise-en-scene; it’s all the more impressive when that talent for detail — pictorial and behavioral — results in an illumination of the world that’s both ruthless and surpassingly compassionate.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Ann Hornaday
    BlackBerry
    BlackBerry, a funny, insightful corporate biopic, tells the unlikely story of how a ragtag team of Canadian computer nerds invented the titular device — a combination “pager, cellphone and email machine” that would revolutionize modern communications until it became known as the thing you owned before you got an iPhone.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Ann Hornaday
    Book Club: The Next Chapter
    Even amid the corny jokes, awkward segues, forced conflicts and predictable resolutions, Bergen and Giannini manage to develop a low-simmer chemistry between the insults.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Ann Hornaday
    Carmen
    Overwrought and overthought, this Carmen somehow winds up being underbaked, as Millepied throws various ideas at the screen, with precious few taking hold with any conviction.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Ann Hornaday
    Beau Is Afraid
    The sad truth is that, for all his ambition, cinematic prowess and hyper-confessional candor, Aster doesn’t stick the landing. Instead, he’s made a movie about unresolved ambivalence that itself goes confoundingly unresolved.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Ann Hornaday
    Renfield
    Cheesy, strident, ridiculous and sometimes disarmingly, stupidly funny, Renfield doesn’t go for the jugular as much as give it a playful and quickly forgotten love bite.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 63 Ann Hornaday
    How to Blow Up a Pipeline
    As a thriller channeling the deepest anxieties of its era, however, How to Blow Up a Pipeline feels urgently, unmistakably of its time.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Ann Hornaday
    Air
    Apparently, the answer is yes: Working from a well-judged script by first-time screenwriter Alex Convery and enlisting a superb cast of appealing ensemble players, Affleck has created something that Hollywood has seemed incapable of making in recent years: a smart, entertaining movie that, for all its foregone conclusions and familiar beats, unfolds with the offhand confidence of the most casually impressive layup.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Ann Hornaday
    A Thousand and One
    This is a tough, beautiful, honest and bracingly hopeful movie about mutual care and unconditional love, with a transformative and indelible performance at its core. A Thousand and One isn’t just worth seeing — it’s worth celebrating.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Ann Hornaday
    The Lost King
    With Hawkins’s alternately elfin and flinty performance at its center, The Lost King winds up being a paean to amateurism and unconventionality.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 88 Ann Hornaday
    Palm Trees and Power Lines
    With Palm Trees and Power Lines, Dack has created a haunting portrait of how trust is manipulated and abused; the trust she builds up with her characters and audience, however, remains steadfast, resulting in a film of disarming candor and power.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Ann Hornaday
    Creed III
    For the most part, Creed III is a matter of clear, straightforward storytelling, with a well-balanced variety of action, feeling, character development and fan-pleasing callbacks. It’s a good movie.
    • 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.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Ann Hornaday
    Emily
    The movie may or may not be entirely true to Brontë, but it is surpassingly, and often deliciously, Brontë-esque.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 25 Ann Hornaday
    Marlowe
    Less intriguingly convoluted than concussed into lifelessness, “Marlowe” is the cinematic equivalent of a word salad: It parrots all the right lines while striking all the right poses, without saying much of anything at all.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 37 Ann Hornaday
    Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
    In “Quantumania,” sprightly pacing and lighthearted humor have succumbed to the turgid seriousness that plagues so much of the comic book canon.
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