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.

Like opening a ticking box, you expect to find a bomb but inside is a metronome counting out the beats of a heart you discover you have.
I spent much of Ennio literally trembling with emotion, and much of that is because the film left enough room to appreciate long swaths of his music.

This beautifully edited documentary (the interwoven transitions between the interviews and the film excerpts are extremely deft) which combines sound bites from a rich array of admirers and select scenes from the maestro's cinematography left me speechless. It not only taught me how Ennio Morricone essentially created and then developed music for films, it did it in a especially moving and amusing way.

In addition to the emotional aspect of the doc, we are treated to commentary from the likes of

Bernardo Bertolucci
Bruce Springsteen
Quentin Tarantino
Clint Eastwood
Hans Zimmer
Dario Argento
Joan Baez
John Williams
Pat Metheny
Roland Joffé
James Hetfield


But more than that, we get to witness first hand amazing moments in his career, including a scene in Once Upon a Time in America where Sergio Leone actually plays Morricone's sidetrack on set during the filming!

Certainly, part of my ranking has to be tied to how mistaken my expectations were of this documentary, but the high it gave me was undeniable. If you're a lover of music, movies or both, I cannot recommend this film strongly enough.