https://www.martincid.com/movies/oasis-don-t-look-back-in-anger/
“The reunion documentary is one of the most compromised forms in nonfiction cinema. It exists because a tour exists, it is financed by the people who profit from that tour, and it usually arrives as a souvenir rather than an inquiry. So the first question worth asking about the film that follows Oasis back onto a stage is not whether it moves. Concert footage of this band, at this volume, will move anyone within range. The question is whether it looks at the group or merely sells the ticket a second time.
The film’s answer is a wager on proximity. It embeds with the band from the first rehearsal, tracks the machinery of a comeback half the audience assumed would never happen, and builds toward the moment its makers clearly regard as the whole event: Noel and Liam Gallagher, estranged for the better part of two decades, sitting together for a joint interview. Everything else is spectacle a viewer can already find on a phone. The brothers in one frame, talking, is the thing only this production had the access to capture.
That access is the film’s thesis and its liability at once. The Gallagher feud has been the band’s second instrument for as long as the music, a running performance of grievance that sold papers and filled rooms. Putting the two men on camera together reframes the reunion as a family story rather than a business decision, which is the more flattering reading and, conveniently, the more marketable one. The film asks a viewer to take the reconciliation at face value while standing inside the commercial apparatus that needs the reconciliation to hold.
Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace are not the obvious hands for a victory lap, which is what makes the assignment interesting. Their work in the music documentary has tended toward the elegiac and the self-aware: a portrait of Blur built around a reunion that felt like convalescence, a group study of a downtown New York scene assembled from the wreckage of its own nostalgia. They know the genre’s traps because they have spent a career walking around them. The screenplay credit belongs to Steven Knight, a writer drawn to working-class myth and to the self-invention of the English North and Midlands, which is precisely the register Oasis has always demanded of anyone trying to explain it.
Formally, the film is built for scale. Haris Zambarloukos, a cinematographer more associated with studio narrative than with tour buses, shoots the stadium sequences for the largest screen available, and the picture is being pushed toward IMAX for exactly that reason. The more revealing choices are quieter. How long the camera stays in the rehearsal room before the noise starts. How much silence it allows between two men who have made a public art of not speaking. A concert film lives or dies on its cutting, and the tension here is between the arena’s appetite for release and the documentary’s need to withhold.
The title is not neutral. “Don’t Look Back in Anger” is the song a grieving Manchester sang together in the street after the attack on its arena, a piece of pop that outgrew its authors and became something like civic liturgy. Naming the film after it claims that inheritance, the idea that Oasis belongs to a city and a class before it belongs to two brothers, and it quietly raises the stakes on the reconciliation. A band can reunite for money. An anthem that means that much asks for something closer to sincerity.
What the film cannot do is stand outside the thing it documents. It is produced through the band’s own recording and music-vision arms and distributed by a studio betting on a streaming event, which makes its independence a structural fiction, however honest its instincts. It cannot tell a viewer whether the reconciliation survives the tour, whether Oasis becomes a going concern again or a one-summer armistice, or whether the interview shows two men who have changed or two professionals who have agreed on a story. Access this complete tends to come with terms. The film is generous and often moving. It is not, and cannot be, disinterested.
Running just over two hours, the documentary is credited to Southern and Lovelace as directors and to Knight as writer and co-creator, produced by Sam Bridger, Guy Heeley, Knight and Tom Mackay through Magna Studios with Sony Music Vision, and released worldwide by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. It carries the name of the reunion it records, Oasis Live ’25, and premieres out of competition at the Venice Film Festival before its theatrical run, an unusually prestigious berth for a rock documentary and a sign of how the distributor intends it to be read.
In the United States the film reaches IMAX and select cinemas on September 11, with United Kingdom IMAX previews landing two days earlier, on September 9. A global Disney+ release, with a Huluwindow in the United States, follows later in the year. For a band whose entire mythology was built on the refusal to look back, a two-hour act of looking back is either the final irony or the whole point.”
