The New Years

Los años nuevos is the first long-form series fully shaped by Rodrigo Sorogoyen, the Spanish director behind El reino, Madre and As bestas, created with his frequent collaborators Sara Cano and Paula Fabra. Produced for Movistar Plus+, the ten-part series had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in 2024 before streaming in two batches at the close of that year.

Its conceit is elegantly simple. Ana turns thirty as one year ends; Óscar turns thirty as the next begins; the night their birthdays meet, so do they. Each episode then returns to a single New Year's Eve across the following decade, charting the rhythm of a relationship through the one date the calendar reserves for taking stock. Iria del Río and Francesco Carril carry almost the entire series between them, and the writing trusts small gestures and half-finished conversations over plot.

The format recalls the time-jumping romances of One Day or Richard Linklater's Before films, but Sorogoyen and his co-creators give it a distinctly Spanish texture of friendship, family and thwarted ambition. Praised at Venice and on release for the naturalism of its two leads, Los años nuevos showed that a filmmaker known for tension and violence could turn, just as precisely, to the quieter business of how two people stay — or fail to stay — in each other's lives.