Ennio

Ennio (2022) — watch online on iFILM — is Giuseppe Tornatore's documentary portrait of Ennio Morricone, the Italian composer who wrote the music for more than five hundred films and picked up two Academy Awards along the way.

Tornatore and Morricone worked together on Cinema Paradiso, and that long friendship gives the film an access most biopics don't get. Morricone talks frankly about beginning his career writing commercial pop arrangements to pay the bills, about the classical establishment dismissing film scoring as lesser craft, and about the experiments with whistling, the human voice and unusual orchestrations that became the sonic identity of Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns. The cast of interviewees ranges widely — Clint Eastwood, Quentin Tarantino, Brian De Palma, Joan Baez, Dario Argento — and each one illuminates a different chapter of the career.

At nearly two hours and forty minutes the film is long, but it earns the runtime: there is simply a lot of music to account for, and Tornatore makes you hear it differently by the end. Stream Ennio online on iFILM.