Oasis Documentary Review: Don’t Look Back in Anger Is a 123-Minute Case for the Biggest Screen You Can Find – Before Disney+ Shrinks It
The most talked-about scene in the Oasis documentary isn’t a hug. It isn’t a punch either. It’s Liam Gallagher walking into a rehearsal room, dropping his bag, asking whether they’re getting on with it, and then leaving while the band is still playing the outro to Champagne Supernova. Sixteen years of silence, resolved by a man who couldn’t be bothered to wait for the last chord. That’s the film in one moment, and it’s why this Oasis documentary review is going to tell you to see Don’t Look Back in Anger on the biggest screen you can reach, this week, before it turns into something you half-watch on a laptop.
In This Article
- What the Oasis documentary actually is – and isn't
- The hidden-camera decision that makes it work
- Cardiff, the hand, and why Noel wanted a time-out
- The Mani tribute, Bonehead, and a priest from Burnage
- Oasis documentary review: the verdict, and the one thing it gets wrong
- The tour the film is selling back to you
- Why the IMAX question matters more than usual
- The wider Oasis year it sits inside
- Practical bits before you book
It’s in UK cinemas now. It opened on Wednesday 9 September, four days after an eight-minute standing ovation at Venice, and it lands on Disney+ “later in 2026” with no date attached. That gap is the whole story. Music documentaries almost always get flattened by the small screen, and this one was built, by the directors’ own account, to be played loud in a room full of strangers.
What the Oasis documentary actually is – and isn’t
Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger runs 123 minutes, carries a 15 certificate, and follows the Live ’25 reunion from the first rehearsal through Cardiff on 4 July 2025 to the last night in São Paulo on 23 November. Steven Knight, the Peaky Blinders creator, is credited as writer and producer. Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern direct, and if you’ve seen their LCD Soundsystem film Shut Up and Play the Hits or Blur’s No Distance Left to Run you already know the register: long takes, no narrator, the band allowed to be as unlovely as they like.
It’s not a career retrospective. Lovelace’s line to NME was that “everyone knows the background and that long time apart”, so the film doesn’t bother re-telling it. It sits inside one year and stays there.
And it’s not a concert film either, at least not in the way the Taylor Swift and Beyoncé cinema releases were. Those were shot as a single show, front to back. This one cuts between rehearsals, the tour bus, fans in the stadium concourses and a Catholic mass in Burnage, with the live songs arriving as punctuation rather than the point. Southern told NME the aim was “to put you right in the middle of the crowd”, and the sound mix was handled by James Mather and Tarn Willers, who between them have Top Gun: Maverick and The Zone of Interest on their CVs. That’s not a detail you’d bother with for a streaming-first doc.
The hidden-camera decision that makes it work
One production choice separates this from every other reunion doc of the last decade. Knight and the directors put ten fixed cameras in the rehearsal room and then got out. By Southern’s account, the band didn’t see a single member of the crew for six weeks. No one was walking around with a shoulder rig, no one was asking Noel to say that again for the wide shot.
The result is that the reconciliation happens without anyone performing it. Knight described the first day to NME: Noel telling Liam how to sing the “take me there” line in Slide Away, Liam taking the mickey, the pair of them looking at each other and laughing. That’s it. That’s the moment the feud ends, and nobody in the room acknowledges it. Compare that with the Beckham or Robbie Williams documentaries, where every emotional beat gets a close-up and a swell of strings, and you start to see why critics who usually roll their eyes at this genre went soft.
Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian gave it four stars and called it a “mammoth tour movie” that “brings the joy and poignancy of reunion”, adding that it “was always difficult to be cynical about Oasis and now it’s impossible”. NME went to four and a half, calling it “masterfully done, with moments of irreverence and intense passion burning throughout”. Time Out’s Phil de Semlyen gave it the full five and the best line of the lot: “It’s The Last Waltz with parkas.” Rotten Tomatoes has it at 97% from 33 reviews as I write this.
Five-star reviews of rock docs are usually a sign the critic is a fan. Four-star reviews from Bradshaw, who is not, are the ones to trust.
Cardiff, the hand, and why Noel wanted a time-out
The Cardiff opening night is the film’s centre of gravity, and the sequence everyone leaves talking about is the walk-on. Liam reached for Noel’s hand as they came out. Noel hadn’t been told. Lovelace confirmed to NME it was spontaneous, and Knight says Noel admits on camera that the first 45 minutes of that show were pure muscle memory, that he wanted to call a time-out and go back to the dressing room because he’d completely underestimated what the crowd would do to him.
That’s the thing the film gets right that the tour coverage last summer mostly missed. The reunion was never really about the brothers making up. It was about tens of thousands of people a night needing something from them, and the Gallaghers being caught off guard by it. Southern described the stadiums as “a football match where everyone supports the same team and everyone wins”, and there’s a section where the band position themselves as an antidote to the general nastiness of 2025, which will either land or make you wince depending on how much patience you’ve got for Liam’s politics.
My view: it lands, mostly because the film doesn’t labour it. It’s a fan in a concourse saying it, not a caption.
The Mani tribute, Bonehead, and a priest from Burnage
A few things in the film that weren’t in the trailer and deserve a mention.
Gary “Mani” Mounfield, the Stone Roses bassist, died while the band were in South America last November, and the documentary keeps the night they learned. Lovelace told NME there was “an energy in the crowd and in the stadium that night” and that the tribute “always felt like it had to be part of the film”. The band played Live Forever for him in Brazil. By the directors’ account it isn’t dressed up with captions or slow fades, which is the correct call.
Bonehead gets his due. Paul Arthurs was the rhythm guitarist on Definitely Maybe, was back in the band for the whole tour, and the film makes the argument that his playing is the thing that makes Oasis sound like Oasis rather than a Noel Gallagher solo show with a louder singer. Southern said in rehearsals “your eye just went to Bonehead”, and Noel has said in interviews that Bonehead is the reason the reunion happened at all. If you only know him as the bald bloke in the back, you’ll come out with a different opinion.
And then there’s Father Luke. The crew went to St Bernard’s in Burnage, the church the Gallaghers’ mother still attends, and asked to film a Thursday morning mass. The set reading that day, chosen months before anyone arrived with a camera, was Peter asking Jesus how many times he should forgive his brother. The priest built his sermon around the Gallaghers. At least one reviewer assumed it was staged. Southern insists it wasn’t, and I believe him, partly because nobody would write something that neat.
Oasis documentary review: the verdict, and the one thing it gets wrong
It’s very good. It isn’t perfect, and the imperfection is a deliberate one: 123 minutes is the survivor of a cut that Knight said earlier this year was running to four hours, and the filmmakers chose to spend that time on 2025 rather than on 2009. If you were hoping the brothers would say anything of substance about the split in Paris, or about the fifteen years of interviews sniping at each other, you’ll be waiting. The joint interview, shot in a pub with Knight rather than a journalist, is by every account the best footage in the film, and Knight himself says it was “just a conversation” rather than an interrogation. This is a film about forgiveness that has decided not to explain what was being forgiven. That’s a choice I understand and still slightly resent.
I’d also push back on the idea, repeated in a few reviews, that the film is “for everyone”. It isn’t. If you didn’t care about Oasis before, two hours of stadiums singing Don’t Look Back in Anger back at the stage won’t convert you, and the absence of any historical context means a 19-year-old who came to the band through TikTok will spend a fair chunk of it wondering who the bloke in the tribute section was.
But for anyone who was there last summer, or tried to be and got stuck in a Ticketmaster queue at position 340,000, it does the job it was built for. It’s a record of a year that a lot of people in this country are going to want to revisit, and it’s an unusually honest one.
Four stars. Five if you were at Cardiff.
The tour the film is selling back to you
It’s easy to forget, twelve months on, how badly the ticket sale went. When the reunion dates were announced in August 2024, the Saturday morning on-sale collapsed under demand, Ticketmaster’s queues ran into the hundreds of thousands, and standing tickets listed at around £135 were being offered at over £350 by the time some fans reached the front, thanks to so-called “in demand” pricing. The Competition and Markets Authority opened an investigation into Ticketmaster within days, and the row fed directly into the government’s consultation on resale caps. Oasis themselves said they’d had no idea dynamic pricing would be used.
The film doesn’t dwell on any of that. Southern acknowledged to NME that “millions of people had tried to get tickets but had been unable to”, and says that was part of the reason they wanted the concert footage to feel “as close to being there as you possibly could”. So there’s a slightly uncomfortable logic to the whole enterprise: the people the film is most clearly made for are the ones who were priced out or queued out last year, and they’re now being asked to pay a cinema ticket to see what they missed.
I don’t think that’s cynical. A cinema ticket is a fraction of what a Wembley seat cost on the secondary market, and the film shows you things you’d never have seen from the pitch. But it’s worth being clear-eyed about what’s being sold.
Why the IMAX question matters more than usual
Every music documentary now gets the same release pattern: a short cinema window, a streaming home a few weeks or months later, and a marketing campaign that treats the cinema run as a premiere rather than the main event. The Disney+ arrival for Don’t Look Back in Anger is confirmed for “later in 2026”, and I’m guessing here, but the pattern for Disney’s recent music titles points to a window of somewhere between six and twelve weeks. Nobody official has said.
The directors are not being coy about where they want you to watch it. Southern’s line to NME was: “If people can watch it on the biggest screen possible, as loud as the cinema is prepared to play it, then they’re going to have a good time.” That’s a filmmaker telling you the home version is a compromise.
And he’s right, for a reason that has nothing to do with picture quality. The film’s best trick is making you feel like part of a crowd, and a crowd is the one thing a living room can’t give you. BFI IMAX in London is running it on IMAX with Laser, with a handful of screenings introduced by Lovelace and Southern, and if you’re anywhere near Waterloo that’s the version to see. Elsewhere, the Odeon, Vue and Cineworld IMAX and premium screens all have it. A mate who saw it at a standard multiplex on Wednesday night said the room applauded after Cardiff, which tells you something about who’s turning up.
We’ve written before about how British cinemas are increasingly leaning on event re-releases to fill big-format screens, and this belongs in the same conversation. It’s not a film that needs the cinema to be understood. It’s a film that needs the cinema to be felt.
The wider Oasis year it sits inside
The documentary arrives in a busy stretch for the band. There’s persistent reporting of a 2027 UK and European run, possibly including Knebworth and a Manchester residency. Nothing has been announced, and when NME asked the directors, Southern’s answer was “I’ve no idea if it’s happening”, which is as clear a signal as you’ll get that the band hasn’t told anyone. Treat it as rumour until an on-sale date exists.
There’s also the question of a live album or a full concert film. Southern told NME there’s “an embarrassment of riches” left over and that he’d like a physical release, but “we haven’t had that conversation yet”. Given the volume of stadium footage the crew shot, a straight concert film for Disney+ in 2027 would surprise nobody.
What the documentary does confirm is that the reunion economy is not slowing down. Between this, the Fontaines DC stadium on-sale and the Glastonbury 2027 registration window, the autumn has become a season of paying for gigs that haven’t happened yet. Oasis are the rare case where you can buy a ticket to something that already did.
Practical bits before you book
The film is in cinemas nationwide from 9 September. The BFI IMAX listing includes subtitled screenings for D/deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences, and BFI members get £2.50 off IMAX tickets. Standard multiplex pricing applies elsewhere, and Odeon’s website has it under the title Don’t Look Back in Anger if the full name doesn’t come up in search.
It’s a 15. I’m assuming that’s for language, which will surprise nobody who has ever heard Liam Gallagher speak for more than eleven seconds.
If you’re planning to wait for Disney+, know what you’re trading. You’ll get the interview, the rehearsals and the Burnage sermon in full, and those play fine on a telly. What you’ll lose is Cardiff. Our piece on rotating streaming subscriptions this autumn makes the case that Disney+ is one of the services worth switching on for a month and off again, and this film will be a decent reason to do it. It just won’t be the same film.
So the real question isn’t whether the Oasis documentary is any good. The reviews have settled that. It’s whether you want to watch the biggest British live music story in a generation with a few hundred people who were there, or on your own with the sound turned down so the neighbours don’t complain. Which one are you going for?
