Watching Oasis: Don’t Look Back In Anger, Stephen Knight (Peaky Blinders)’s exhilarating portrait of Oasis’ long-awaited return, the Gallagher brothers remain perfectly-calibrated opposites: Liam, instinctive and gloriously unpredictable; Noel, dry, watchful and incapable of resisting a good put-down.
But one of the great pleasures of the reunion documentary, opening in cinemas this week (Sept. 9), is seeing how much affection now exists beneath all the familiar friction. Throughout, Noel is genuinely enthralled by Liam’s presence — at one point declaring that Liam putting a tambourine on his head during last year’s Live ‘25 Tour as “the coolest f—ing thing in the world” and describing him simply as “delightful” to be around. Liam, meanwhile, is relentless in trying to make his elder sibling laugh at any given moment.
It’s surreal viewing, to put it lightly. After 16 years apart, the brothers returned to the stage last summer for 41 shows, taking Oasis across the world and into stadiums filled with both lifelong devotees and a striking new generation of fans. Knight’s film follows the journey from the tense first rehearsals — including one dramatic scene in which Liam disappears from the room before the last chord of “Champagne Supernova” rolls out — through to the gigs themselves, capturing the band as they lead enormous crowds in singing their hearts out. Along the way, the film shows how the reunion took on a different character in each city, shaped by the fans’ reactions and rituals, while making clear that Oasis no longer belongs to just the generation that grew up with them in the 1990s.
The joy of seeing the band back together is also inseparable from the knowledge of how spectacularly things fell apart the first time in 2009. As the documentary reminds us, Oasis’ final show ended before it began, with the band pulling out of Paris’ Rock en Seine festival after a backstage altercation between Liam and Noel, who walked away from the band that night. Knight, alongside filmmakers Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace, who directed 2016’s Oasis: Supersonic, get unprecedented access to the brothers as they prepare to return to the stage, allowing their individual accounts of the split (“It was disgraceful,” Noel says at one point) — and their feelings about each other now — to gradually emerge.
What follows is a collection of moments that bring the reality of such a high-stakes reunion into focus: Liam explaining that he treated the songs with “respect” by giving up drinking and smoking before the shows; the striking evidence of just how good his voice sounds; and Noel, visibly overwhelmed on opening night in Cardiff, saying he nearly needed a “time out” to exhale and take in what is happening.
Here are five standout scenes from Oasis: Don’t Look Back In Anger.
-
The Final Countdown
The tension starts as a thrum in your ear, or a pulse somewhere between a heartbeat and the low rumble of an amp. We watch Noel and bandmates Paul “Bonehead” Arthurs, Gem Archer and Andy Bell, alongside a bevy of techs and session musicians, anxiously scuttle around a vast rehearsal space, waiting on Liam’s arrival, fiddling with their instruments as though they’re trying to keep themselves occupied. They play through a number of Noel’s guitar lines, but there’s a creeping sense that proceedings can’t properly begin until his brother walks into the room (or, to borrow TikTok lingo, the saxophones keep getting louder).
And when he does, it’s like the release of the pressure valve. Liam strolls in, parka hood over his eyes, throws down an Adidas bowler bag and immediately punctures a moment of bodily suspense — and 16 years of brotherly strife — by taking issue with the positioning of baffles on the drum kit: “They’re giving me the hump.” Sublime.
-
Keep the Faith
The film also serves a brilliant depiction of fandom that manages to be immersive, warm, uplifting, and, just when you thought you were safe, utterly tear-jerking. It’s also frequently laugh-out-loud funny. Your eyes might pop when one punter attending the opening night of the tour compares Oasis’ breakup to “losing a child,” before abruptly switching gears to show off his new Fred Perry polo to the camera and exclaim, “It’s time to get on it!”
There are reams of clips of fans all across the world sobbing, hugging and finding a greater high in the music, but the star of the show is a young man, also in Cardiff, wearing a green Stone Island jacket. We watch him for an extended period, visibly disbelieving what he’s just experienced, suspended in the afterglow of the first show and feeling so profoundly, almost nauseatingly, grateful for what he’s just witnessed.
-
Run for Your Life
Along the way, we hear at length from several Oasis stans around the world about how the band has changed their lives, from a Brazilian fan with, amazingly, a large bull terrier named after Bonehead, to a deep-sea researcher in Seoul and a survivor of the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing, in the aftermath of which “Don’t Look Back in Anger” became an anthem of remembrance and solidarity across the city.
That energy boils over back in Cardiff, where we see a slew of fans charge towards the stage to the strains of Mozart, willing to give everything they’ve got for a place on the barrier. Earlier in the film, a city police meeting shows an officer briefing his team, describing the crowd as “highly excitable,” an understatement of almost comic proportions. “It’s just gonna be f—ing carnage,” is how Liam puts it, before the band walks on stage.
-
Like Father, Like Son
A particularly affecting detour of the film is into a corner of the Gallagher story that has previously remained almost entirely off-limits: their children meeting one another. After decades of the brothers’ relationship being endlessly mythologized and dissected, these six young people have inherited all the drama secondhand, and the scene carries the charge of watching a family history begin to rewrite itself. It’s moving to watch them live it up across the world, before Noel reappears to tease his youngest, Donovan, for “getting hammered every single night,” then tells Liam how his antics — including being sick in the back of a car while singing “Rock ’n’ Roll Star” after a show — reminded him of the pair of them in the ‘90s.
-
For a Moment, Time Stands Still
The ultimate payoff, however, comes towards the end, when Noel and Liam are finally interviewed together. Noel talks about the importance of “changing the narrative” around the band, while Liam — with aviator sunglasses on, as ever — listens with a gentle smile. They talk about their longstanding power struggle and finding forgiveness, but also about the newly mundane intimacy of being brothers again: texting, sending each other “stupid” videos, finding reasons to stay in touch.
Even after two hours of heart-bursting material, it’s this single exchange that makes the documentary feel most affecting. For a moment, all the noise and the headlines fade to black, leaving only two siblings who have, despite everything, found their way back to each other. Then Liam, characteristically, reduces the whole thing to four simple words: “Oasis, man. Oasis saves.” And maybe that’s all there is to say.
