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‘Ennio’ Review: Ennio Morricone, the Maestro of the Movie Soundtrack, Gets the Entrancing Documentary He Deserves
The movie devotes itself to the glories of Morricone's soundtrack music, but it's also about his mischievously self-serious personality.
But even if you consider him next to his fellow giants (Bernard Herrmann, John Williams, Nino Rota, Hans Zimmer, Max Steiner), Morricone scaled his own wild peak, inventing his own kind of beauty, his own transcendent cacophony. And the more we hear of the music, in all its fabulous and voluptuous eclecticism (the swooning pop songs; the Western scores that sounded like ghostly Mexican rock ‘n’ roll frontier acid trips; the political-drama soundtracks for films like “The Battle of Algiers” that were as charged-up as the revolutions they were about; the descents into mad experimental clatter; the transcendent romanticism that infused his beloved later work), the more we may have the same thought: Where did it come from? Watching “Ennio,” you barely learn such essential details about Morricone as the fact that he had four children; that he lived his entire life in Rome; that he was married to the same woman, Maria Travia, for 63 years, right up until his death (they were, by all accounts, devoted to each other); or what he liked to eat, or where he liked to go on vacation.
Or read this on Variety