Ann Hornaday, the Washington Post Film Critic Who Wrote for the Person in the Seat, Dies at 66

Ann Hornaday, who spent more than two decades as the chief film critic of The Washington Post and became one of the most trusted bylines in American movie writing, died on Sunday, October 18, 2026, at her home in Baltimore. She was 66. Her husband, Dennis Greenia, told the Post that the cause was glioblastoma, a form of brain cancer, according to TheWrap. The Baltimore Banner reported that Hornaday died at the couple’s Evergreen home in North Baltimore. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2008, wrote hundreds of reviews for the Post, and was a regular reviewer on PBS NewsHour. Washington Post Executive Editor Matt Murray said in a statement, quoted by TheWrap: “For many years, Post readers were blessed by Ann’s informed, insightful, warm, accessible and totally unique voice. Reading her work was like talking with a close — if much more knowledgeable — friend.”

A critic who wrote for the everyday moviegoer

The tributes that followed the news kept returning to the same quality: Hornaday wrote criticism for the person actually buying the ticket. The Baltimore Banner reported that she wrote “well-crafted, carefully considered criticism with the everyday moviegoer in mind,” and that this made her work stand out from critics who delivered more scathing or pretentious takedowns. Liz Seymour, a former managing editor at The Washington Post, told the Banner: “Ann was a beautiful writer but she was also an extremely accessible writer.” The Banner called her “salt of the earth” in the words of colleagues who knew her in Baltimore, her adopted home, where she had earlier served as the Baltimore Sun’s film critic and appeared on WYPR’s “Midday at the Movies.”

That accessibility was a method, not a softening. Hornaday’s 2008 Pulitzer finalist submission included her review of Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood,” according to TheWrap, and she considered Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker” the best film she ever reviewed. TheWrap also noted that she was an early supporter of filmmakers including Ryan Coogler, Greta Gerwig, Alexander Payne and Tom McCarthy — directors whose work she championed before it was safe consensus. Her criticism treated readers as intelligent adults deciding how to spend an evening, and treated the movies, high and low, as worth taking seriously on those terms.

From Ms. magazine to the Post’s critic’s chair

Hornaday was born Ann Mills Hornaday on March 9, 1960, in Iowa City, Iowa, and grew up in Des Moines, according to the Baltimore Banner. She graduated from Smith College in 1982 with a degree in government, then moved to New York, where she worked at Ms. magazine and became co-founder Gloria Steinem’s administrative assistant. In her 2017 book, she credited Steinem with pushing her toward the freelance life: “It was Gloria who urged me to become a freelancer, because she had found the freedom and variety of freelancing to be both fulfilling and fruitful in discovering her own voice as a young writer,” Hornaday wrote, as quoted by the Banner. She freelanced for outlets including The New York Times and Premiere, according to TheWrap.

Her newspaper path ran through the Austin American-Statesman and then the Baltimore Sun before she joined The Washington Post in 2002, succeeding Rita Kempley as the paper’s film critic, a detail noted in Filmofilia’s obituary account drawing on The Hollywood Reporter. A journalism fellowship took her to Athens, Georgia, where she met Greenia at a listening party for R.E.M.’s 1994 album “Monster” — “a wife of a journalism professor thought that we should meet,” Greenia told the Banner of their introduction. They were married for 26 years. She took a buyout and left the Post in 2025, according to TheWrap.

‘Talking Pictures’ and one last book

Hornaday’s most durable argument about movies lives in her 2017 book “Talking Pictures: How to Watch Movies,” a guide built around talking with filmmakers about their crafts — among them Kenneth Lonergan on dialogue and Spike Lee on cinematography — that taught readers to notice what they were seeing rather than simply verdict-shopping. It was the print version of her critical voice: generous, specific, and aimed at making the reader better at watching. TheWrap reported that she had recently finished a book about the making of “All the President’s Men” — the definitive newspaper movie, fittingly, for a newspaper critic — tentatively slated for release in 2028.

Her own criticism could be as quotable as the films. In 2023, writing about Ridley Scott’s “Thelma & Louise,” one of her favorite movies, she said the film “had nothing to do with my real life,” 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,” a line preserved in TheWrap’s remembrance coverage of the tributes that followed her death. It captures what her readers recognized: the review as a record of what a film did to one honest, attentive viewer, offered up so other viewers could test their own responses against it.

Hornaday is survived by her husband, Dennis Greenia; her daughter Victoria; her stepdaughter Leila; and her brother, William Hornaday III, according to TheWrap and Variety’s account as reported by Primetimer. She leaves behind hundreds of Post reviews, a generation of moviegoers who learned how to watch from her, and — if the 2028 book arrives as planned — one final piece of work still to come. For more from the Entertainment Desk, see Previously’s premiere-day coverage of ‘Phony’ on Hulu.