Besides having written and directed some of Spain's most successful and award-winning films, Alejandro Amenábar is also a renowned composer of film scores. In his feature film debut Tesis (1996), considered Spain's best film that year by the Spanish Film Academy and received with great enthusiasm internationally, Amenábar composed the score besides having written and directed the film. One year later, he composed the score for his second film, Abre los Ojos (1997), a box office hit in Spain and released on an international scale. In 1999 José Luis Cuerda's La lengua de las mariposas and Mateo Gil's Nadie conoce a Nadie were released. The music for both films was composed by Amenábar, and his work on La lengua de las mariposas was acknowledged with a Goya nomination. The Others (2001) and Mar adentro (2004) were the films that established him internationally, and he also wrote their scores. The Others, starring Nicole Kidman, was enormously successful with audiences and international critics alike, besides receiving another nomination for Best Original Score at the Goya Awards. Mar adentro, which won the Oscar® for Best Foreign Film and also 60 international awards, also won the Goya for Best Original Score. After having someone else write the soundtracks for his next two films, Agora (2009) and Regression (2015), Amenábar returns to film score composition in his feature film Mientras dure la guerra (2019).