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Michael Abels (b. 1962)

Birthplace:
Phoenix, Arizona, USA

Born:
October 8, 1962

Biography from TheMovieDB

Michael Abels (born October 8, 1962) is an American composer best known for his genre-defying scores for the Jordan Peele films Get Out and Us, for which Abels won a World Soundtrack Award, the Jerry Goldsmith Award, a Critics Choice nomination, and multiple' critics awards. The hip-hop influenced score for Us was short-listed for the Oscars and was even named “Score of the Decade” by TheWrap. Other recent media projects include the films Bad Education, Nightbooks, Fake Famous, and the docu-series Allen v. Farrow. Current releases include Beauty which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and is now streaming on Netflix, Breaking (formerly 892) which premiered at Sundance, and his third collaboration with Jordan Peele, Nope. Abels’ works also includes many concert works, such as At War With Ourselves for the Kronos Quartet, Isolation Variation for Hilary Hahn, and the opera Omar co-composed with Grammy-winning singer/songwriter Rhiannon Giddens. Some of these pieces are available on the Cedille Records, including Delights & Dances and Winged Creatures. Current commissions include a work for the National Symphony Orchestra and a guitar concerto for Mak Grgić. Abels is co-founder of the Composers Diversity Collective, an advocacy group to increase visibility of composers of color in film, gaming and streaming media.

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Additional information:

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Film Production

Music:
2023  Landscape with Invisible Hand
2023  The Burial

Music Arranger:
2023  Chevalier
2023  Landscape with Invisible Hand
2023  The Burial

Music Producer:
2023  Chevalier
2023  Landscape with Invisible Hand
2023  The Burial

Orchestrator:
2019  Bad Education
2023  Chevalier
2023  Landscape with Invisible Hand
2023  The Burial

Original Music Composer:
2017  Get Out
2019  Bad Education
2019  See You Yesterday
2019  Us
2020  All Day and a Night
2021  Fake Famous
2021  Nightbooks
2022  Breaking
2022  Nope
2023  Chevalier
2023  Landscape with Invisible Hand
2023  The Burial
2024  The American Society of Magical Negroes

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TV Production

Original Music Composer:
2021  Allen v. Farrow
2024  The Acolyte

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About the Movie Section

Most data and links to images for the Movies section come from TheMovieDB (TMDB).

Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).

At least one plug-in comes from IMDb.

Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)

While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:

  • I added "runners up" to Top 10 lists, treating them as ties where applicable and numbering them accordingly at the bottom of each list.
  • Regarding those polls wherein "franchise" movies were submitted as one project until BFI's policy changed to regard them separately, I treated them as ties and renumbered the affected lists accordingly (e.g. the Godfather films).

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  • For additional corrections and profile removals, please e-mail The Open Movie Database (OMDb).

Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).

Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.

Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.