Ennio: The Maestro (Italian: Ennio), also known as The Glance of Music,[3] is a 2021 documentary film directed by Giuseppe Tornatore, celebrating the life and legacy of the Italian composer Ennio Morricone, who died on 6 July 2020. The film consists of interviews with directors, screenwriters, musicians, songwriters, critics and collaborators who have worked with him or who have enjoyed him throughout his long career.[4][5][6]
Content
Giuseppe Tornatore, Oscar-winning director, pays tribute to his friend and collaborator Ennio Morricone, retracing the life and works of the Italian composer, from his debut with Sergio Leone to the Oscar Award for The Hateful Eight in 2016. The film comprises interviews with renowned directors and musicians, recordings of some of the maestro's acclaimed world tours, clips from some iconic films set to music by Morricone and exclusive footage of the scenes and places that defined Morricone's life.[7]
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 90% of 48 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 7.7/10. The website's consensus reads: "Attenzione! The man who came out of post-war Italy to revolutionize the Western, Maestro Ennio Morricone, is masterfully captured in a documentary befitting his genius."[13]Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 75 out of 100, based on 15 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.[14]
A review in The Guardian stated: "his documentary represents a painstakingly detailed, fantastically entertaining, and profoundly exhausting deep dive into the career of the hyper-prolific Italian composer Ennio Morricone, known best perhaps for his orchestral scores for Sergio Leone (including the so-called Dollars Trilogy and Once Upon a Time in the West), Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 – and a whole bunch of American films, ranging from the great (Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables) to the abominable (Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight)",[15] while another review in the same newspaper deemed that "As a piece of film-making, this documentary is cumbersome, repetitive and ploddingly conventional – all traits that were anathema to its subject, the late Italian film composer Ennio Morricone (1928-2020)."[16] A review in The Irish Times merged those divided assessments into one by saying "Tributes become repetitive but there’s much to enjoy in this documentary about Ennio Morricone".[17]