Throw a Champagne Supernova on the Wonderwall

Directors Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern probably didn’t know what they had when they started working on Don’t Look Back In Anger, their thumping new documentary about the band Oasis’ 2025 reunion tour. The tour marked the first appearance by the band in 16 years, a period during which estranged brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher didn’t even speak, much less jam together. So things could have been extremely tense, even disastrous.

Oasis: Don’t Look Back In Anger ★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Directed by: Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern
Written by: Steven Knight
Starring: Liam Gallagher, Noel Gallagher, and the rest of Oasis
Running time: 122 mins

After a brief introductory sequence, we cut straight to the rehearsal studio, where Noel, the less temperamental of the brothers, is leading the band in some run-throughs of the hits. Oasis sounds good. It always sounds good. But the central question lingers: What’s going to happen when Liam Gallagher, the most sneeringly wild-card of all rock stars, shows up? Well, he pops in, angrily grabs the microphone, and delivers his first number with absolutely perfect pitch, like he’d never quit.

Clearly, rehearsals went fine — or at least without adding to the required narrative — because we don’t see much more of the six-week process of preparation. Instead, we get the film’s best sequence, a seemingly minute-by-minute recounting of the crowd bleeding toward the arena of the band’s first reunion show, in Cardiff, Wales. As people comment throughout the film, yeah, the fans are drunk, and rowdy, but mostly they’re psyched, and as rapt as religious zealots heading out on a surprise pilgrimage. It’s clear that most of them thought they’d never get to see Oasis live again, or at all.

And then, behold the band, filling the arena with flawless sound, and it’s as astonishing an image of a throbbing rock arena as you’ll ever see in a film. Don’t Look Back In Anger repeats those images, and those vibes, over and over again. I saw it in a theater in Austin, with only seven people present, and none of us were in our seats by the end. This movie rocks that hard.

There’s some narration from the Gallagher brothers, and you see them doing talking-head stuff toward the end, but there’s not a lot. These are not brothers given to articulate self-reflection. Instead, the directors give us mini-vignettes about Oasis fans in Manchester, and Ireland, as well as Brazil, Argentina, and Japan. Notably, a lot of these fans are very young. They were children, or at least teenagers, when Oasis broke up. But there are lots of olds in the crowd as well. Oasis, as it turns out, isn’t boomer rock, or Gen-X nostalgia, or a youth movement. It’s basically everyone rock.

There was a time when music documentaries existed to chronicle rock-and-roll dysfunction. But in recent years, the business and the genre has heralded a change in that approach. Todd Haynes’ Velvet Underground movie, a David Bowie memorial documentary, Becoming Led Zeppelin, and Baz Luhrmann’s incredible recent Elvis-in-Vegas documentary footage all existed to celebrate the music, the artist, not the downfall. Don’t Look Back In Anger is a stunning addition to this recent canon because it’s not a nostalgia piece. It documents something happening in real time, a concert tour that ended up being so amazing and revelatory that it surprised even the people performing.

Time and again, across the world, we see people of all ages weeping at an Oasis show, like campers at the end of an exhausting and emotional summer. People collapse on the floor of the arena after the show is over, spent. Their faces glow transcendently. And it affects the musicians. They had no idea. By the end of the film, Liam, the angriest and most cynical lad in all of rock, is still a bit snarky and funny, but he’s also softened. You can see that the tour has changed him. He’s satisfied, happy, fulfilled, and, yes, probably quite rich.

The film ends with a Gallagher monologue about the need to forgive, because life is too short, and we need to just have fun and love one another. Again, this is coming from Liam, to the tune of “what the world needs now, is love, sweet love.” The vibes were great in the theater at the end of the movie. The guy sitting in front of me had the best time of everyone, puffing on his vape in violation of theater policy the whole time. But you know what? I forgave him. It’s what Liam Gallagher would have wanted.