Ann Hornaday, Washington Post
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For 1,018 reviews, this critic has graded:
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49% higher than the average critic
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3% same as the average critic
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48% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 3.1 points higher than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Ann Hornaday's Scores
- Movies
| Average review score: | 62 |
|---|---|
| Highest review score: | |
| Lowest review score: |
Score distribution:
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Positive: 603 out of 1018
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Mixed: 225 out of 1018
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Negative: 190 out of 1018
1,018
movie reviews
- By critic score
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- Ann Hornaday
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. -
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- Ann Hornaday
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. -
- Ann Hornaday
Qualifies as the most painful, poetic and improbably beautiful film of the year. -
- Ann Hornaday
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. -
- Ann Hornaday
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. -
- Ann Hornaday
See Killer of Sheep, and see it again and again. It's one of those truly rare movies that just get better and better. -
- Ann Hornaday
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. -
- Ann Hornaday
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. -
- Ann Hornaday
The result is a soaring, touching, funny and altogether buoyant movie that lives up to its title in spirit and in form. -
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- Ann Hornaday
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. -
- Ann Hornaday
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. -
- Ann Hornaday
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. -
- Ann Hornaday
McQueen has taken the raw materials of filmmaking and committed an act of great art. -
- Ann Hornaday
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. -
- Ann Hornaday
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. -
- Ann Hornaday
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. -
- Ann Hornaday
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. -
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- Ann Hornaday
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. -
- Ann Hornaday
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. -
- Ann Hornaday
Coppola brilliantly conjures the young queen's insular world, in which she was both isolated and claustrophobically scrutinized. -
- Ann Hornaday
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. -
- Ann Hornaday
In addition to being a study in great acting, this is a study in great directing. -
- Ann Hornaday
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." -
- Ann Hornaday
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. -
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- Ann Hornaday
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. -
- Ann Hornaday
That rare romantic comedy that dares to choose messiness over closure, prickly independence over fetishized coupledom, and honesty over typical Hollywood endings.