Movie News: R.I.P. Ennio Morricone; Tom Cruise, Unquarantined; a Talk With Werner Herzog

In today’s Movie News Rundown: Ennio Morricone, one of the greatest film composers who will ever live, is gone. Let’s listen to some of his music. Plus: New British quarantine policies benefit Tom Cruise — and all of us, really. And Werner Herzog is just showing off at this point.

Tom Cruise, Unquarantined: The U.K. is allowing a few film and TV productions to travel to the country to film without needing to quarantine for 14 days. The decision came after Oliver Dowden, the U.K.’s secretary of state for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport had a nice chat with Tom Cruise, who will now be free to shoot Mission: Impossible 7 in the country. The productions will need to observe all of the safety standards you would expect.

R.I.P. Ennio Morricone: The prolific composer has died at 91, The New York Times reports. His music sounded like wind, slamming metal doors, steel sliding from a gun belt, funerals. It was crucial to Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns, including Once Upon a Time in the West, when it was played by a gunfighter called Harmonica (Charles Bronson, above).

Listen: My favorite Morricone work may be his music for Brian De Palma’s 1987 The Untouchables: It has the mystery and danger of his past work, and references his past work while adding a powerful pulse of hope.

Werner Herzog Directed a Film in a Language He Doesn’t Speak: Herzog’s latest, Family Romance LLC, is entirely in Japanese. As he explained to us in the latest MovieMaker Interviews podcast, if he couldn’t direct in a foreign language, he wouldn’t be much of a director, would he? You can listen on Apple or Spotify or right here:

Comment of the Day: “It’s not only visual obfuscation taking over TV aesthetics–what about over-the-top soundtracks that overtake dialogue? Thank goodness I already knew a bit about the Central Park 5, otherwise I would never have been able to follow the Ava duVernay TV treatment. Key passages of dialogue, dramatic in themselves, were drowned out by musical ‘enhancement.’ Came off as 19th century melodrama or silent film techniques,” says Ann Marie Shea, in a story about Hannibal looking brighter on Netflix.

Tomorrow: Check in for some exclusive and cool news related to Twin Peaks. (No, it’s not a new season of Twin Peaks.) Not subscribed to our newsletter? Let’s fix that.