Washington Post film critic Ann Hornaday authored an op-ed on April 12 declaring herself a Christian. However, the journalist made sure to stress that she would keep her religion out of Post reviews. She also reiterated her dislike for movies such as The Passion, Son of God and Noah.
According to Hornaday, the reason for removing open expressions of faith from her work is "the journalistic habit of not allowing my personal biases to surface, thereby inappropriately using my work as a religious platform and alienating those readers who don’t share my faith or have no faith at all." She lectured, "Those individuals have every right to read a movie review or essay without feeling sermonized, excluded or disrespected." Yet Hornaday has repeatedly let her political biases slip through.
Washington Post critic Ann Hornaday bitterly complained a few years back that movies like "Knocked Up" and "Waitress" cheated American womanhood by failing to ponder and explicitly cherish the A-word: "It's a setup that has some viewers, especially women who came of age in a post-Roe v. Wade America, wondering just what world these movies are living in." She accused the film-makers of "moral hypocrisy."
The Post critic knocked the movie Won't Back Down as an "anti-union screed." She complained:
Based loosely on the “parent trigger” laws that have passed in California enabling citizens to take control of failing schools, the film blithely passes over the questionable results from those takeovers, just as it glibly ignores the uneven track record of charter schools and the effects of poverty on childhood education, from hungry students who can’t focus to the permanent state of fight-or-flight that makes learning next to impossible.
It’s so much easier to reduce a notoriously complex problem to teachers -- whether they’re idealized or demonized, as they are in “Won’t Back Down.” The grinding, everyday work of being an engaged public school parent -- communicating, negotiating and, yes, sometimes fighting with teachers and principals -- doesn’t hew to an inspiring three-act structure.
In contrast, Martin Scorsese's un-biblical Last Temptation of Christ was a "devout masterpiece."
Of the Christian-bashing film Saved!, Hornaday praised it as bearing "the unmistakeable stamp of authenticity, even at its most outrageous."
So, Hornaday will interject her politics into reviews, but won't let her faith shine through?
