Oasis: Don't Look Back in Anger review: I went in cynical, I came out singing in the car

I should say upfront where I was coming from on this one. I was a big Oasis fan as a kid, but that fell away hard somewhere around Standing on the Shoulder of Giants. The later albums didn't land for me, the antics got tiresome, and by the time the reunion was announced I felt basically nothing. I watched everyone else lose their minds over ticket sales and just shrugged. So when I sat down for Don't Look Back in Anger, the documentary built around that reunion tour, I was fully expecting a glossy victory lap, a shameless cash-in dressed up as an event. I was not expecting to come out of it in tears.

Directed by Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace (the pair behind the LCD Soundsystem documentary Shut Up and Play the Hits) and produced by Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight, the film had its premiere at Venice before a cinema run this month, with a Disney+ date still to follow. None of that context is why it got me, though. What got me was the story it tells about two brothers.

Surly Liam, meticulous Noel

The rehearsal footage sets up a contrast the whole film runs on. Liam turns up late, looking thoroughly unbothered, sings his parts, and leaves with his bag over his shoulder like he's got somewhere better to be. It's genuinely funny. Noel is the opposite: first in, working the band through the details, visibly the one holding the whole thing together, and visibly unimpressed by his brother's approach to punctuality. For a while it plays like this reunion might not survive its own rehearsals.

Then the first gig happens, and Liam turns into exactly the frontman everyone remembers: charismatic, commanding, entirely different from the bloke who couldn't be bothered to stick around a rehearsal room. As the tour goes on, at least in how it's cut together, you can see something thaw between the two of them. Noel keeps his old acerbic wit but looks more frail and more worried than I remembered him. Liam is still blunt, still a bit of an idiot in the most affectionate sense, but there's a warmth building between them that the film doesn't oversell, it just lets you watch it happen.

The moment that actually got me

There's a section built around the death of Gary "Mani" Mounfield, The Stone Roses' bass player, which happened during the tour. The brothers played Live Forever the night he died and dedicated it to him, and the film holds on their faces just long enough for you to see how genuinely it landed with them. I'm a lifelong Stone Roses fan myself, saw them three times after their own reunion, and Mani's death hit hard for a lot of us. Watching it handled with that much sincerity, rather than turned into a moment for the cameras, is what actually broke me. It's the best few minutes in the film.

The other thing the documentary does well is the fans. It spends real time on the crowds, on what these gigs plainly meant to the people who'd waited fifteen years for them, and that depth of feeling comes through far more strongly than I expected going in. It's easy to forget, once you've gone lukewarm on a band yourself, how much they still mean to everyone else in the room.

The verdict

The setlist the film builds its live footage around leans heavily on the early years, which suits me fine, that's the era I actually loved. Oasis were never a subtle band, the songs are riff-based and straightforward, and I'd genuinely forgotten how good that simplicity feels live, how easily the lyrics turn into a room full of people singing along. The film brought all of that back for me in a way I didn't see coming.

I went in ready to call this unfinished business dressed up as a cash grab. I came out thinking it really was unfinished business, and that they were right to go and finish it. I put Oasis on again for the first time in years on the way home, and sang along the whole drive back. I also, for the record, wish I'd got tickets to the actual tour. That's a good outcome for a music documentary to leave you with, and it's exactly why this one's worth your time even if, like me, you'd quietly written the whole reunion off.