Ennio (2022)

This is a must see for fans of great cinema music. Perhaps alongside John Williams and John Barry, the eponymous maestro has scored in an unique and innovative way, a great many films since the 1960s and this film tracks how he rose from a classical music training to an (eventual) Oscar winner. It does suffer from the perennial problem of films like this, we see (and hear) too little of his marvellous works - especially my own favourite "Ecstasy of Gold" - but the narrative offers a quickly paced series of contributions from those well known, and those less so. It is astonishing just how many films he did provide the music for, some of it truly memorable and some of it truly dreadful - but here we see a man who never shied away from pushing the boundaries. His creative use of vocals, even of a typewriter to create his sounds demonstrates well his almost boundless imagination. Though at times a little dry, this documentary lays that skill and passion engagingly before us. Bertolucci, Eastwood and Joffé all contribute in a fashion that avoids the adulatory, and makes this an enjoyable chronology not just of Morricone himself, but of world cinema too.