Remembering Ann Hornaday: She Invited You Into Her Film World — And Just Her World

I don’t remember when I started working with Ann Hornaday.

I mean, I know the date because I had an employment letter from HR. But I don’t recall a shift in how she related to me as I went from someone at a competing newspaper to a colleague inside the fold. She’d already treated me like I was part of her family. She already treated everyone like they were part of her family.

So when I joined The Washington Post in 2017 from The Los Angeles Times, it brought no change in our dynamic. She just continued being as warm — and friendly and empathetic and commiserative — as when we worked apart. Ann didn’t have Jewish blood as far as I know. But with her, you were always mishpocha.

Ann died on Sunday at age 66. Gone way too soon, but for a good soul, is there ever on time? I didn’t lead with the fact that she was a film critic — and a damn good one, as evidenced by her many viral reviews, her acclaimed book Talking Pictures and her finalist status for the Pulitzer Prize — because it wasn’t the most salient thing about her. The most salient thing about her was her clear-eyed view of the world — and how she treated you as if you were all of her world.

I do remember the first day I met Ann. It was at the Cannes Film Festival in the early 2010s, at one of those anonymous townie apartments where talent interviews were being conducted. An OG indie-film publicist named Jeff Hill introduced us.

“You guys know each other, right?” he said to me, I still feeling like a cub in the clubby world of Cannes journalists. I didn’t know her, and I was worried she was about to underscore that, in fact, she didn’t know me.

But not missing a beat, she looked at both Jeff and myself. “Of course,” she said warmly. She knew we’d never met. But that was in the past. She knew me now, so why harp on anything else?

Ann and I would proceed to see each other at festivals in the years to come, at parties and screenings and all the mad rushes in-between. We all need a friend at a place like that, those work-y environments where everybody seems to know more people than you and feelings of isolation and overwhelm stay barely at bay. Ann would not only provide that friendship — she’d immediately make you feel at home, greeting you like you went to high-school together, introducing you to whoever else she might be talking to, sharing a thought about the movie you just saw or the peculiarity of the day. (She lived in Baltimore for years but grew up in Iowa and never fully shed her Midwestern accent; when I hear her voice the one word that comes to mind is “fabulous,” with that Northern Cities vowel-shift on the a.)

If I faced a difficult or crossroads moment, I would just shoot her a note. The response would inevitably come back: “Call me later.” She would then give me windows around her many deadlines and screening times. Then when I called her she would make a half hour, an hour, longer, to hear what was eating at me.

Was she a mentor? A role model? Ann would scoff at such designations. She was just being herself. Yet it always, unassumingly, felt inspirational. And aspirational.

Journalists and critics in particular can be a surly bunch (I’d apologize, but most I know would take it as a compliment), as though the healthy barriers put up to a new work of art also sometimes extend to their everyday interactions. Ann certainly had the barriers around art — you had to earn her good review — but somehow they stopped at the doors to the screening room. She always managed to reach out and connect without even making you realize she was doing it. In describing her to a current colleague I called her “chipper-cynical,” and I think that about captures it — not at all blinkered about the hypocrisies or foibles around her, but always keeping a bright eye toward how they could be made better. You always felt a little better, too, after talking to Ann — not because she performatively said something uplifting but because she got down and commiserated with you. You always felt a little less alone after talking to Ann.

And I talked to her a lot after I joined the Post. We were on different desks — I on Business and she on Culture — but our worlds overlapped, and I would often find myself reaching out to her about something weird in the field, some fracas at the paper. During one particular minor moment of crisis that felt big at the time, Ann didn’t tell me not to worry or downplay my concerns: She shared my disbelief about what was happening. Even before she offered a smart strategy to fix it, I already felt like the problem had been shrunk to atomic size.

How many people did she make feel this way at the paper in her more than two decades there? Dozens? Hundreds? How many more outside it? Maya Angelou’s dictum that people won’t remember what you did but they’ll remember how you made them feel never seemed more true than it does with Ann. For all the people today recalling her criticism — the Post did a nice tribute in which executive editor Matt Murray rightly called it “informed, insightful, warm, accessible” and so did PBS NewsHour, to which she contributed — I bet there are hundreds more remembering how she made them feel.

I had heard a few weeks ago from another former Post colleague that her health had taken a very bad turn and that, sadly, communication was no longer possible. It all seemed so unbelievable. I wanted to call her up and talk about it. Then I remembered.

People always ask what they can do after someone dies. Cook a meal for their family? Make a donation to their charity? Nice gestures, all. But when I think about what to do for Ann — what would mean something to her, what would really cosmically move the needle — I think it’s as simple and difficult as this: treat someone, even just once, the way Ann treated you.