Part of Music City Mondays: Morricone x3
Giuseppe Tornatore, director of the beloved CINEMA PARADISO, turns his camera on his longtime collaborator Ennio Morricone (1928 – 2020) in a moving and comprehensive profile of the indefatigable composer. Tornatore’s documentary portrait explores the breadth of the maestro’s career, from his early Italian pop songs to the fistful of unforgettable film scores that he wrote, including THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY, THE THING, DAYS OF HEAVEN and hundreds of others. This examination thoughtfully captures insightful commentary from Morricone’s closest collaborators and contemporaries, featuring testimonies from artists and directors such as Bernardo Bertolucci, Marco Bellocchio, Giuliano Montaldo, Dario Argento, Clint Eastwood, Joan Baez, Quentin Tarantino and more. ENNIO affords the master one last chance to recount his career and deconstruct the artistic process that led him to win two Academy Awards and author over 500 unforgettable soundtracks.
“If you’ve watched a movie in the last half century there’s a good chance that you’ve heard music by Ennio Morricone, the titanic Italian composer and arranger who helped define films as we know and hear them… One of the movie’s nice surprises is that Morricone turns out to be a total charmer, a low-key showman with a demure gaze that he works like a vamp and an impish smile that routinely punctuates one of his anecdotes.” —Manohla Dargis, NYT Critic’s Pick, New York Times “From its opening sequence, a beautiful portrait… Although it celebrates Morricone’s particular genius, this documentary is not greedy with the nostalgia it generates as it casts light on so many parts of 20th century culture. Throughout, you are reminded of other brilliant aspects of those films, those songs referred to — the implicit impetus is to watch or re-watch them. Ennio is discreetly generous.” —Saskia Lloyd Gaiger, Little White Lies “The film devotes itself entirely to a celebration and exhaustive analysis of Morricone’s music — it’s a portrait of the artist as virtuoso soundtrack renegade… Beneath the innovation what you ultimately hear in Morricone’s music is something breathtaking in its romantic grandeur: a beauty as haunting and dreamlike as the cinema itself.” —Owen Gleiberman, Variety
