In 1995, staring at a blank screen after her first assignment as a film critic, Ann Hornaday did not know how to begin. Three decades later she had written hundreds of reviews as chief film critic of The Washington Post and become a Pulitzer Prize finalist; she died October 18, 2026, at her home in Baltimore, Maryland, at 66, according to The Washington Post.

A friend, the television critic David Friedman, told her what had worked for him when he made the same career jump: ask three questions of every film. "Every time you review a movie, ask yourself three questions: What was the artist trying to achieve? Did they achieve it? Was it worth doing?" Hornaday recalled him telling her, in a 2019 interview with her alma mater. It became her method for the rest of her career, a way, she said, to meet a film "halfway and really judge it on its own merits, rather than my personal biases," according to Smith College.

Ann Mills Hornaday was born March 9, 1960, in Iowa City, Iowa, and raised in Des Moines by her adoptive parents, William R. Hornaday Jr., a urologist, and Mary Mills Hornaday. At Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, she recalled teach-ins, door-knocking, leafletting and marches against nuclear proliferation and the war in El Salvador, graduating with a government degree in 1982 during what she called a very politically engaged time. She then moved to New York, took a job fact checking at Ms. magazine, and became an assistant to its co-founder, Gloria Steinem, before freelancing for Premiere and other magazines through the 1980s and into the 1990s.

That blank screen came in 1995, when the Austin American-Statesman hired her as its film critic. Two years later she moved to the Baltimore Sun, and in 2002 The Washington Post brought her on, where she eventually rose to chief film critic and spent more than twenty years reviewing movies for the paper. Hornaday was, by her own account, an unlikely convert to the beat: "I didn't start out as a movie buff. I kind of came to this sideways as a freelance writer," she told PBS NewsHour in 2017. Readers came to know her for getting there early. She was among the first critics to take seriously the work of directors including Tom McCarthy, Ryan Coogler, Greta Gerwig and Alexander Payne, long before their names carried weight at the box office.

In 2008 she was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. Nine years later she turned her three-question method into a book, "Talking Pictures: How to Watch Movies," published by Basic Books in 2017 and built from years of interviews with directors, actors and crew members. In its acknowledgments she thanked Ben Affleck, Ava DuVernay, Steven Spielberg, Tilda Swinton and Gary Oldman as her unofficial tutors.

Her column voice was conversational rather than academic, reading individual films through the cultural moment around them. Asked by Smith College's alumnae magazine to name her favorite movie of all time, she chose "The Best Years of Our Lives," the 1946 William Wyler drama, calling it beautifully written, perfectly acted, and gorgeously shot and designed, with a score she described as absolutely exquisite.

Her beat extended past the printed page. She appeared Friday afternoons on WTOP radio and co-hosted the podcast "At the Movies with Arch & Ann" with Arch Campbell and Marc Sterne. For roughly two decades she was a regular at Landmark's E Street Cinema in downtown Washington, arriving for early morning press screenings after a stop at the Starbucks around the corner, a ritual that ended when the theater closed in March 2025.

The last film she reviewed before stepping away from the paper was a 2024 remake of "Road House," according to her own account in The Washington Post. Starting around the spring of 2024 she took a year-long leave to research a book on the making of "All the President's Men," interviewing surviving cast and crew and working through director Alan J. Pakula's papers; her colleague Ty Burr covered her weekly reviews while she was away. While still on leave, in August 2024, she traveled to the Chautauqua Institution in New York to lecture on wonder and awe in film, telling the audience, according to The Chautauquan Daily, "Awe is never deeper than when we're humbled and elevated as one being, one body alone together in the dark." She returned to reviewing for the Post in April 2025.

She died October 18, 2026, survived by her husband, Dennis Greenia; her daughter, Victoria Greenia; her stepdaughter, Leila Greenia; and her brother, William Hornaday III.

"Ann was a fantastic critic, and a warm, lovely person. This is just terribly sad news," the film critic Stephanie Zacharek, a peer at Time magazine, wrote the day her death was reported.

Hornaday's name sits on hundreds of reviews that taught Washington Post readers to notice who wrote a screenplay and why a shot was framed the way it was. Her 2017 book turned that training into a method anyone could borrow at any multiplex, and it is still in print. She left behind the manuscript of a second book, on the making of "All the President's Men," built from the same patient curiosity she brought to a blank screen in Austin in 1995: what was the artist trying to achieve, did they achieve it, and was it worth doing.