By August Barham

April 4, 2022

 

Ann Hornaday, a film critic at The Washington Post, prefers to write her reviews in the early morning before anyone else is up to distract her—besides the birds fluttering around the feeder in front of her new home office.

 

Since her husband transformed the semi-winterized front porch of their Baltimore home into her personal office, Hornaday completes much of her writing in the modest, narrow space. As she sits at her desk, typing out analyses of new flicks, Hornaday is not surrounded by movie posters or memorabilia, but by books. An assemblage of books populates the cubbies of a massive black shelf and stands tightly stacked along the top of the shelf, grazing the ceiling. Hornaday’s office decor reflects her early life—dominated not by film, but by the written word.  

 

“I'm kind of an accidental film critic,” said Ann Hornaday, 62, brushing her lengthy auburn hair behind her shoulders. “It really happened gradually, and it happened on the job. I didn't major in film, I didn't take any classes in criticism or even journalism for that matter.”

 

Now a highly regarded critic at The Washington Post, Hornaday’s path into the world of film criticism was not a straight one. Before interviewing giants in the film world and masterfully dissecting works of cinema, she pursued her passion for writing through a liberal arts education at Smith College in Massachusetts. It was not until Hornaday followed that passion to New York, where she wrote for various arts and entertainment publications, that she began analyzing or even regularly viewing film. After accepting a position as a film critic with The Austin American-Statesman in 1995, Hornaday quickly made an impressive name for herself. Her broad experiences have made her a well-learned and generous writer.

 

“So much of my career, even now because I didn't go to film school, is learning about this medium,” Hornaday said. “And then if I have a hole in my knowledge—because that has always been a little bit of an insecurity, frankly—at least I know how to learn. I know where to go.”

 

Hornaday places her hand thoughtfully on her chin, considering how her past experiences with literature and other subjects inform her current work. She concludes that her more meandering career path propelled from subject to subject by a knack for writing, has been an asset to her work.

 

“It all informs and it's all really valuable,” Hornaday said. “Probably more valuable, really, than just drilling down into cinema, just because you can also recognize references. When somebody is quoting a painting or another art form, it helps to have that broad knowledge.”

 

This week, Hornaday will be reviewing “The Lost City,” the new Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum adventure-comedy. When she takes her seat at the film’s screening on Tuesday afternoon, Hornaday will look for ways to describe why the film may or may not have worked for her, without robbing readers of experiencing the plot for themselves.

 

“Often when I'm taking notes, I'm looking for those little hints, like language I can use, words that come to mind,” Hornaday said, describing what makes her reach for her pen. “It's almost like free association—sensory things I'm getting that are beautiful, or funny or moving.”

 

Once the credits roll and her notebook is filled, Hornaday usually tries to depart the darkened theater and return to her sunny, book-laden office to write and file her review. This week, events for Sunday’s Academy Awards ceremony impede Hornaday’s diligent writing scheduling. Her editor, Michael O'Sullivan, will have to wait until Wednesday morning to read the review.

 

When Hornaday sits to write, she will not examine the film solely through her own trained eye, but also through that of the film’s audience. On Friday, her review will be available for audiences to read and determine if they will be venturing out to see the film, and Hornaday takes that responsibility seriously. 

 

“I think I am more sympathetic to people, especially now after the pandemic,” Hornaday said, thoughtfully gazing out her wide office windows onto the Evergreen neighborhood street. “It's a big choice to go out to see a movie, it's a financial commitment and now it’s a health commitment. So, I really, really do try to look at a film through many eyes—the core fans, the garden variety ones the random ones. You're trying to see it through so many different lenses.”

 

Growing up in Des Moines, Iowa in the 1960s and 70s, Hornaday and her friends would pass some of the languorous days of adolescence at a showing of the newest blockbuster. But she was never a movie geek; she was never collecting films like Pokémon or saving old ticket stubs in a shoebox.

 

“We would see like ‘Young Frankenstein’ when it came out or things here and there, but it was not at all as movie obsessed as I feel like the culture has become in terms of just this constant onslaught of films,” Hornaday said with assurance. “Looking back, I wouldn’t say that I was a movie fan.”

 

Throughout her early life, Hornaday was more interested in written stories than visual ones. She spent much of her youth reading and writing as much as she could.

 

“Even from a young age, I liked words, I liked language, I loved, loved, loved to read,” Hornaday said. “I think even as far back as my grammar school days, I had an idea that I wanted to do something that involved writing.”

 

She has pleasant memories of stowing away her parent’s magazines and poring over the eloquent editorials contained within. 

 

“My parents got three magazines in the house,” Hornaday recalls, listing the publications off on her fingers. “They got Time, National Geographic and The New Yorker, and I devoured The New Yorker. I would almost read it cover-to-cover as a young teenager and teenager.”

 

One of her favorite writers and greatest inspirations at the time was Pauline Kael, who just happened to be The New Yorker movie critic. Kael is remembered as a sharp-witted and audacious writer whose opinions on film often stood boldly in opposition to common sentiments of the time. Hornaday did not admire Kael for her views on film, but for that keen voice.

 

“She just made a huge impact on me,” Hornaday said in a tone of passionate reverence. “Not so much because of the movie piece, but just because of her voice. She just had such a strong, uncompromising—I just had never read anybody like her. I'm sure that that had an impact on me, in ways that I can't even articulate, or express or recognize.”

 

Spending her youth consuming the thoughtful words of older generations left Hornaday with her own unflagging, intelligent voice as a writer. O'Sullivan describes her voice as clear and identifiable in its literary roots and command of the language.

 

“As someone who knows a lot of words, plays a lot of word games and reads constantly, it's a constant delight and surprise to me when I open up a review of hers and read through it and have to look up a word,” said O'Sullivan, 63. “I am an editor and I am a reader who loves to come across a new word or a turn of phrase that makes me run to the dictionary, and Ann is constantly doing that.”

 

Her learned voice is also born from her broad education at Smith College, a four-year liberal arts college in Northampton, Massachusetts. At Smith, Hornaday majored in government, finding it to be an enticing subject for her to grapple with over text. Hornaday credits her liberal arts education for equipping her with an ability to think and write deeply and analytically; a skill that O'Sullivan considers to be one of the great attributes of her writing. She has a gift for sitting in what O’Sullivan dubs the “enormous gray area between greatness and awfulness,” in which most films reside.

 

“She's sort of a virtuoso of nuance, pointing out what's good about something and what's not so good about something,” O’Sullivan said. “That’s an art form, that's hard to do, but she does it quite well.”

 

Hornaday’s close colleague and friend, Marc Sterne, says that the thoughtfulness which pervades her film criticism also exists in her day-to-day disposition. Sterne gushes when given the opportunity to talk about Hornaday and expresses the privilege he feels to have befriended her.

 

“She's one of the most thoughtful people, and most generous of spirit and so caring,” said Marc Sterne, 53, a producer on The Tony Kornheiser Show. “If you were drawing up a sketch of how you wanted somebody to be in real life, you would start with a blueprint of Ann Hornaday because she checks all the boxes.”

 

Following her graduation from Smith and a stint working as a researcher and editorial assistant for Ms. magazine, Hornaday moved to New York City to pursue writing full time. Despite its romanticized reputation as a writer’s heaven, Hornaday says she chose New York for purely practical reasons — she had more couches to sleep on there. She hustled as a freelance writer and covered any number of topics for any number of publications — including the film magazine, Premiere. 

 

“Premiere kind of got me into the movie world,” Hornaday said. “It was based on my work with Premiere that I did my first story for the New York Times Arts and Leisure section. Then, I kind of became a regular in the Arts and Leisure section writing about film. That's when the film thing turned into a specialty, but that wasn't until the early 90s.”

 

As a non-movie buff, Hornaday did not immediately possess the encyclopedic knowledge of film history or theory that many of her colleagues did. However, her liberal arts education had given her the invaluable ability to learn. As a young reporter, the world was her film school. Hornaday learned about film theories and concepts such as cinéma vérité not from a classroom but from an interview with documentary legend Albert Maysles. She broke down the technicality of physical performance not with classmates but with Stanley Tucci and Johnny Depp. Now, Hornaday exudes content confidence in her craft.

 

“Separate from the fact that she's a brilliant writer, and the fact that she's talked to all these people and gone to all these festivals,” Sterne said. “She has such a wealth of knowledge of the entire industry and a readily available command of all of that.”

 

In 1995 Hornaday officially became a film critic, accepting a position with The Austin American-Statesman in Austin, Texas. Hornaday attributes The Statesman’s decision to hire her despite her lack of experience as a critic to her broad skills built up through years of public and liberal arts education.

 

“The reason I got that job and that they thought I could be a credible film critic isn't because I had been one,” Hornaday explained. “It was because of all those skills I learned in high school and college about thinking critically, being able to write, if I don't know something, being able to figure out how to learn about it.”

 

After entering the world of film criticism, Hornaday never went back. She attended an arts journalism fellowship at the University of Georgia in Athens where she studied filmmaking. She went on to work for The Baltimore Sun and The Washington Post and took on a slew of other film-related creative projects including podcasts and a book, “Talking Pictures: How to Watch Movies.”

 

This morning, Hornaday may be found in her home office, listening to the birds twitter outside her window as she caringly dissects the latest films. The books that surround her as she works in the simple space represent much more than they may appear to. They represent the origin of an uncompromising, sophisticated and introspective voice in the world of film criticism.

 

“I think probably every film critic has a different story of how they got to where they are, but mine is definitely more sideways than most,” Hornaday said.