“Music by John Williams” probably would’ve been a pleasure to watch even if it hadn’t gone as deep into the process of scoring as it does: a glorified supplement, made enjoyable mainly by the way it hits our nostalgic triggers. What makes it special is that it truly cares about the nuts and bolts of marrying pictures to music and understands how to explain the finer points to people who aren’t musicians – Full review at RogerEbert.com
Sometimes, the documentary even feels rigorous. Thanks to his ample access to Spielberg’s home movies, Bouzereau is able to give us behind-the-scenes treats like footage from various scoring sessions, as well as a few precious outtakes like music-free clips from Jaws and unused pieces from Star Wars. But I wish there were more moments like the one where Williams blends musical theory and rhetoric to explain why the five-note central theme of Close Encounters is more effective than the pages of additional five-note combinations he experimented with. – Full review at The Hollywood Reporter
“Music for John Williams” is intended more as a greatest-hits reel — the documentary equivalent of a flattering coffee-table book — than an attempt to better understand the man. The film does mention an early tragedy: the unexpected death of Williams’ wife Barbara Ruick from an aneurysm in early 1974. And it touches on a tricky moment in his career, when he (temporarily) resigned from conducting the Boston Pops a decade later. While that incident reminds how film composers aren’t taken as seriously in the classical music community, Coldplay frontman Chris Martin calls Williams “the biggest pop star ever.” – Full review at Variety
A richer and more curious film might not frame those as rhetorical questions, but “Music by John Williams” is — understandably — too awed by its subject to ask anything more about him. Less a celebrity bio-doc than it is a hyper-bloated version of the tribute reel the Oscars might play before giving Williams a lifetime achievement award (do they still air those things?), Bouzereau’s movie immediately concedes that Williams is just a simple fella from Flushing who happens to have scored our collective imagination. And I mean immediately: The very first thing we hear is Steven Spielberg saying that “Jonny is too nice of a guy to write such genius music.” – Full review at IndyWire
The best moments are when Williams sits at his piano and picks out his tunes. For Jaws, says Spielberg, he was “expecting something tremendously complex and [what Williams played] was almost like Chopsticks with a couple of fingers … I thought he was joking.” Williams explains why his five-note phrase at the heart of Close Encounters of the Third Kind works. “There is something spiritual about it … it’s a conjunctive phrase that ends with an ‘if’ or a ‘but’… creating an expectation with the fifth degree of the scale.” A piece of manuscript paper with 50 other rejected five-note phrases show his workings. Spielberg marvels at the nuances and detail of his writing: in the snake sequence in Raiders of the Lost Ark, “Johnny was scoring for individual snakes,” he says. – Full review at The Guardian
Bouzereau isn’t looking to pull tales of tragedy out of Williams. Biographical information is fairly uneventful, following the young man as he moved from New York to California under the care of his parents, with his father, Johnny, a working musician. Williams was raised in a musical household, and this influence paired him to the piano, developing his skills throughout his formative years. He joined the Air Force in the 1950s, eventually called on to use his gifts to compose for films while in Canada, brought into a world previously experienced by his dad. “Music by John Williams” also explores the creation of his own family life, eventually becoming a parent to three kids (daughter Jenny is an interviewee), while his first wife, Barbara, died suddenly in 1974, leaving the workaholic to manage a household. This loss is as close as Bouzereau gets to pain here, finding Williams still reluctant to discuss the moment that drastically changed his life. – Full review at Blu-Ray.com