Washington Post Critic Ann Hornaday Dies at 66

Ann Hornaday, chief film critic of The Washington Post for more than two decades and a 2008 Pulitzer Prize finalist, died Monday at 66 from brain cancer.

The news reached working critics mid-screening. Thelma Adams of The Wrap, who left the same screening after hearing it, recalled a conversation about what Hornaday represented: a pioneering woman reviewer who raised a family, wrote with consistent finesse, and outlasted peers who now write Substacks or freelance. Their verdict on the trade itself was blunt: daily newspaper film criticism is dying.

Hornaday is the evidence of what that loss means.

What did she actually build?

Born Ann Mills Hornaday on March 9, 1960, in Iowa City, and adopted at birth by urologist William R. Hornaday Jr. and Mary Mills, she grew up in Des Moines and graduated from Smith College in 1982 with a degree in government. She then spent two years in New York as personal assistant to Gloria Steinem at Ms. Magazine.

The CV that followed tracks the shrinking map of staff criticism:

• Freelance work for The New York Times and Premiere magazine
• Film critic at the Austin American-Statesman, 1995–1997
• The Baltimore Sun
• The Washington Post, from 2002
• A buyout in 2025, after 23 years

She is survived by her husband of 26 years, Lawrence Greenia; their daughter, Victoria Greenia; a stepdaughter, Leila Greenia; and a brother, William Hornaday III.

How did she write?

Hornaday's stated aim was reaching readers, not talking down to them. Her 2017 book "Talking Pictures: How to Watch Movies" put that into practice, drawing on conversations with filmmakers: Kenneth Lonergan on dialogue, Robert Altman — "the master of realism in sound" — Jack Lemmon on acting, and Spike Lee on cinematography.

Her critical prose could carry real weight. In 2022 she wrote: "Of all artistic mediums, cinema occupies the trickiest space between fabrication and reality, exploiting the porous nature of both to become a third thing entirely: the distortion of the literal truth that becomes internalized as consensus history."

One of her favorite films, Ridley Scott's "Thelma & Louise," connected to her long-running attention to women on screen. "The film 'had nothing to do with my real life,'" she wrote in 2023, "'other than the exhilaration of watching two women light out for the territory, with zero figs to give and needing only each other for support. Is this what "Easy Rider" felt like to baby boomer men?'"

Who spoke for her?

Former Washington Post writer Jada Yuan, on Twitter: "She was also generous and funny and kind and would send random notes praising your work and sign them, 'Your fan, always.'"

Yuan added a detail that says something about Hornaday's character under pressure: after taking the buyout and learning she was ill, she called Yuan personally, because she knew Yuan attended film festivals and, in Yuan's words, "didn't want me to worry about keeping anything secret from her friends. So, please, talk about Ann. Share your stories."

What does her death change?

One book remains. Shortly before she died, Hornaday finished a behind-the-scenes account of the making of Alan J. Pakula's 1976 "All the President's Men," with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Woodward and Bernstein. She had called the film a "masterpiece" that "exemplified film as a supremely collaborative medium, with all the artists and technicians involved demonstrating superb craft, skill, taste and smarts." The book is tentatively scheduled for release in 2028 — a critic's last argument, arriving three years after she is gone.