For 887 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 50% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 47% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 3.4 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Ann Hornaday's Scores

  • Movies
Average review score: 62
Highest review score:
Critic Score 100
Lowest review score:
Critic Score 0
Score distribution:
887 movie reviews
    • Metascore: 83
    • Ann Hornaday 100
    This installment has achieved a nearly impossible hat trick. It's a movie that is exegetically correct enough to appease the most hard-core buffs, while opening up the final frontier to a whole new generation of fans who have yet to appreciate Star Trek's ineffable combination of sci-fi action, campy humor and yin-yang philosophical tussle between logic and emotion.
    • Metascore: 83
    • Ann Hornaday 100
    A smart, alert, supremely entertaining movie.
    • Metascore: 94
    • Ann Hornaday 100
    When viewers are ultimately released from The Hurt Locker's exhilarating vice grip, they'll find themselves shaken, energized and, more than likely, eager to see it again.
    • Metascore: 79
    • Ann Hornaday 100
    Qualifies as the most painful, poetic and improbably beautiful film of the year.
    • Metascore: 73
    • Ann Hornaday 100
    The Princess and the Frog invite viewers to see the world as a lively, mixed-up, even confounding place, to recognize essential parts of ourselves in what we see, and to say: This is what we look like.
    • Metascore: 71
    • Ann Hornaday 100
    In elaborating on the original book so boldly, and repopulating it so richly, Jonze has protected Where the Wild Things Are as an inviolable literary work. In preserving its darkest spirit, he's created a potent, fully realized variation on its most highly charged themes.
    • Metascore: 94
    • Ann Hornaday 100
    See Killer of Sheep, and see it again and again. It's one of those truly rare movies that just get better and better.
    • Metascore: 86
    • Ann Hornaday 100
    For filmgoers determined to see cinema not just as mass entertainment but as an art form, The Beaches of Agnes arrives like an exhilarating call to arms.
    • Metascore: 98
    • Ann Hornaday 100
    With this film, del Toro seems to have created his manifesto, a tour de force of cautionary zeal, humanism and magic. At this writing, Pan's Labyrinth is the best-reviewed film of 2006 listed on the movie review Web site Metacritic.com, and for a reason: It's just that great.
    • Metascore: 88
    • Ann Hornaday 100
    Up
    The result is a soaring, touching, funny and altogether buoyant movie that lives up to its title in spirit and in form.
    • Metascore: 92
    • Ann Hornaday 100
    A searing, apocalyptic and finally breathtaking drama.
    • Metascore: 89
    • Ann Hornaday 100
    Goodbye Solo is visually simple and stunning, especially the haunting nightscapes of Solo's perambulations. But more important, Goodbye Solo is driven by deep feeling and sensitivity. Don't miss it.
    • Metascore: 92
    • Ann Hornaday 100
    Thanks to Bauby's courageous and honest writing, and Schnabel's poetic interpretation, what could have been a portrait of impotence and suffering becomes a lively exploration of consciousness and a soaring ode to liberation.
    • Metascore: 84
    • Ann Hornaday 100
    Working with his longtime cinematographer Emmanuel "Chivo" Lubezki, Cuaron creates the most deeply imagined and fully realized world to be seen on screen this year, not to mention bravura sequences that bring to mind names like Orson Welles and Stanley Kubrick.
    • Metascore: 82
    • Ann Hornaday 100
    McQueen has taken the raw materials of filmmaking and committed an act of great art.
    • Metascore: 89
    • Ann Hornaday 100
    Thanks to Marsh's sensitive storytelling, Man on Wire manages to put Petit's performance into another, more ineffable realm: What began as a caper turned into poetry, and poetry became a prayer.
    • Metascore: 85
    • Ann Hornaday 100
    Oropelled by memorable performances by mostly unknown actors. The most famous of the ensemble, Hanna Schygulla, delivers a by turns serene and shattering performance as a mother struggling with loss, conscience and the first glimmers of unexpected connection. She's only one essential and unforgettable part of a flawless whole.
    • Metascore: 85
    • Ann Hornaday 100
    Nothing comes easily in Atonement, especially its ending, which, both happy and tragic, is as wrenching as it is genuinely satisfying. How fitting, somehow, that a novel so devoted to the precision and passionate love of language be captured in a film that is simply too exquisite for words.
    • Metascore: 88
    • Ann Hornaday 100
    Rarely has love at any age been depicted so honestly on screen. For such a fully realized portrait to be created by a 28-year-old first-time director is even more remarkable.
    • Metascore: 82
    • Ann Hornaday 100
    A film of rare intelligence, beauty and compassion.
    • Metascore: 88
    • Ann Hornaday 100
    This is an example of a writer and director working in perfect harness, with Reed smoothly ratcheting up the story's suspense and Greene speculating on his cardinal theme of moral ambiguity. They don't make movies like The Fallen Idol anymore, all the more reason to see it now while you can.
    • Metascore: 81
    • Ann Hornaday 100
    A riotous, rapturous explosion of sound and color, Black Orpheus is less about Orpheus's doomed love for Eurydice than about Camus's love for cinema at its most gestural and kinetic.
    • Metascore: 65
    • Ann Hornaday 100
    Coppola brilliantly conjures the young queen's insular world, in which she was both isolated and claustrophobically scrutinized.
    • Metascore: 89
    • Ann Hornaday 100
    The result is a perfect combination of slapstick and satire, a Platonic ideal of high-and lowbrow that manages to appeal to our basest common denominators while brilliantly skewering racism, anti-Semitism, sexism and that peculiarly American affliction: we're-number-one-ism.
    • Metascore: 84
    • Ann Hornaday 100
    In addition to being a study in great acting, this is a study in great directing.
    • Metascore: 69
    • Ann Hornaday 100
    Morgen plunges viewers completely into the anarchic, exhilarating, finally ambiguous world of 1968 America; his final stroke of genius is his choice of music, which includes a breathtaking use of Eminem's "Mosh."
    • Metascore: 81
    • Ann Hornaday 100
    A celebration -- of love, commitment and devotion until the bitter end. Gay and straight viewers alike are sure to be inspired by this lyrical testament to a corollary of Tolstoy's famous dictum: Every unhappy family might be unhappy in its own way, but every genuinely happy family is a triumph.
    • Metascore: 84
    • Ann Hornaday 100
    Won't break your heart -- it will make it soar.
    • Metascore: 84
    • Ann Hornaday 100
    What makes Milk extraordinary isn't just that it's a nuanced, stirring portrait of one of the 20th century's most pivotal figures, but that it's also a nuanced, stirring portrait of the thousands of people he energized.
    • Metascore: 75
    • Ann Hornaday 100
    That rare romantic comedy that dares to choose messiness over closure, prickly independence over fetishized coupledom, and honesty over typical Hollywood endings.