‘Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger’ Review: A Rich, Poignant Music Doc

A funny thing happened to me while watching the new film Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger. I had been somewhat dreading the assignment, as I often find music documentaries tedious, and in particular did not want to watch two hours of brothers Noel and Liam Gallagher bickering and puffing themselves up. So I trudged into the theater quite skeptical. Before too long, though, a tear came to my eye. And then, to my surprise, I basically couldn’t stop crying for the rest of the film. Not heaving sobs, mind you; but certainly the bittersweet, choked-up mistiness of nostalgia. Maybe this band — which burned fast and bright in the sky 30 years ago — meant more to me than I realized.

The film, from directors Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern, quite successfully shows us that Oasis means a great deal to many people across the world. Don’t Look Back in Anger is part concert film covering the band’s blockbuster 2025 reunion tour, and part backstage reflection on the long, strange trip of it all. Those hoping for some inside dirt on the Gallaghers’ famous feud, or about the mechanics that brought them back together after a 15-year estrangement, will not be satisfied. This is a nice, celebratory, water-under-the-bridge movie; there’s to be no personal nor political interrogation.

The movie is going to be on Disney+, after all — where it will surely have the most uses of the word “cunt” of any piece of content on the platform, unless The Mandalorian takes a weird turn in the third season that no one told me about.

Some might argue that the film’s niceness, its poignant vibe of celebration and gratitude, is a tellingly apt fit for the band’s music, which was sometimes as mocked for its Top 40-friendly, Britpop neatness as it was beloved by others. In those folks’ minds, the rough and ready Mancunian antics of the brothers never quite matched — and was perhaps overcompensation for — the sellable sentiment of their songs. Don’t Look Back in Anger is firmly not for those critics, though I’d imagine even the hardest of hearts would have trouble resisting the film’s bleary consideration of time’s passage and the joy of collective passion. It certainly made this live-music-averse critic eager to go to a concert, any concert, for the first time in a while.

Lovelace and Southern have compellingly stitched together interviews, performance clips, audience reactions, and a few detours into the lives of individual fans. The film has a heady momentum, even if its heavy reliance on montage sometimes makes it all feel like a long intro to a narrative that never quite arrives. In those interviews, the brothers are charmingly self-effacing and humble, a far cry from the braggadocious, aggressive posturing that defined their early celebrity. Maybe they’re just putting on a good act for the cameras, but the film endearingly softens their image while still giving us some of their famously witty insouciance (especially Liam’s), their wry outlook on their rocky years and the wholly different bond they’ve formed in middle age. When Noel refers to his brother as “delightful,” it’s just about the sweetest thing you’ve ever heard. 

The film is certainly casting a spell, and whether or not that’s simply cynical (and insidiously effective) marketing doesn’t much matter when you’re caught up in it. What really drives home the feeling the film, and the band, is trying to evoke is the extensive, close-up footage of concertgoers cheering and weeping, amazed to be hearing these iconic songs — the most iconic of which come from the 1995 album (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? — played live for either the first time in years or the first time ever. The fandom seems to range from Gen Z to the northern edges of Gen X, a melange of people in the U.K., Ireland, Brazil, South Korea, and the U.S. who are gleaning something mighty not just from this music, but from the fact of its return, the mighty reconciliation its performance implies. 

I suppose you could find some political dimension there; one could make a sweeping statement about the film’s message of unity and hatchet-burying offering a solution to the atomized societal mess in which we’ve found ourselves. I don’t know if I want to go that far, but it is an undeniable pleasure, a warming and holistic charge, to watch crowds of people having the time of their lives together, experiencing huge emotions en masse. 

We see a young man, his face red and tear-stained, standing alone in an arena after the concert, overwhelmed by what he’s just seen and no doubt sad that it’s ended and now he must return to the relative mundanity of regular life. A middle-aged fellow then goes to give the lad a hug, a seeming stranger reaching out to say, “I get it.” Such communal empathy seems in awfully short supply these days, especially if one spends a lot of one’s time online, as so many of us do. Don’t Look Back in Anger reminds us of the potential wonder and connection of doing things IRL. 

But this all might mean a lot less were it not for these particular songs, carefully meted out in the film as it steadily builds to the big hits. What sonorous and, it turns out, timeless walls of sound they are: layered, plaintive, defiant anthems that may have been deemed corny at some point in the years after their release, but now have taken on the amber glow of true classics. I probably would have put the title song at the end, but “Champagne Supernova” — with its amiably nonsensical poeticism carrying us back to car rides and school dances and dreamy nights alone in our bedrooms — works just fine, too.