ENNIO MORRICONE

Recorded at shows in Verona, Naples and Rome, this is as close to a Morricone live album as we'll get (given he's in his late seventies). The maestro conducts a 90-piece orchestra and 100 vocalists through a dozen selections from his (over) 400 scores. It's as gorgeous as you'd expect. Beginning with, to this reviewer's ears, his finest work—Once Upon A Time In America—it lopes, veers and swoops through themes and purple passages from, among others, The Good, The Bad And The Ugly, Cinema Paradiso and Once Upon A Time In The West.

Some of the artist's landmark recordings are inducted into the museum

Directed by Roland Jofféand elegantly scripted by Robert Bolt, with a landmark score by Ennio Morricone, this follows Robert De Niro's ex-mercenary and Jeremy Irons' Jesuit priest during violent 18th-century South American land-grabbing. And still, there's always been something disturbing about the way the movie so eagerly endorses the underlying missionary project.

More cowbell! More frogs! Morricone! Rubber! New Order enter their imperial phase

Hauntologists increasingly more than their influences

The best albums, books and films of the year, plus Jarvis Cocker, Phoebe Bridgers and Margo Price

Paul McCartney, Uncut’s Review Of 2020, Neil Young, Elton John, Jarvis Cocker, Phoebe Bridgers, The Damned, Lucinda Williams, AC/DC, The Kinks and Moses Boyd

Bells-and-whistles boxset polishes overlooked treasures from the Oxford group

The founder of Throwing Muses, The Breeders and Belly 
on the records that validated her “inner goth romantic”

Geoff Barrow and friends' third outing exudes impulsive joy