Oasis: Don't Look Back in Anger review
By Joel Humphries · Watched 09.17.26
★★★★ 4 / 5
Spoiler-free review
Built on the simple thrill of hearing Oasis roar again, this reunion doc leans into what matters: the songs, the crowds, and the way a band can stitch eras and families back together. The access is terrific—stage, backstage, and a smart focus on fans across continents whose stories give the film its pulse. Liam and Noel’s détente is present without becoming therapy; the fun of their kids orbiting the circus adds texture and humor. It’s a straightforward music documentary, not a scavenger-hunt fan film, and that’s exactly right. In a theater, those bangers hit like they should, and that’s enough.
Full review — contains spoilers
This is exactly what I wanted an Oasis reunion documentary to be. Liam and Noel Gallagher famously spent years refusing to perform together after the band blew apart, and then somehow reconciled enough to put it back together for a massive reunion tour, and this follows that comeback.
There's no complicated premise. You follow the band through the tour, you get the music, the crowds, backstage material and some sense of Liam and Noel working out how to be around each other as adults. The filmmakers also spend a lot of time with the fans, which matters, because the interesting thing about this reunion isn't only that two brothers stopped fighting long enough to get onstage. It's what Oasis still means to an enormous number of people around the world. The documentary follows the tour internationally and keeps cutting back to individual fans talking about specific songs and what the band meant to them. You get people who have spent most of their adult lives waiting to see Oasis together again, and you get younger people who weren't old enough to experience the band the first time, and that gives the film real emotional weight instead of two hours of concert footage.
You also get some of the Gallagher family story. Liam and Noel talk about how they managed to sit down and reengage after all those years, and you see the next generation of the family around the tour, which is one of the better side stories in here, because the feud didn't only affect the two of them. Their families grew up while these guys weren't speaking, and now their kids are getting to know each other on this ridiculous global tour their fathers somehow rebuilt. Some of them show up dressed like their fathers were in the '90s, which is pretty funny.
The music is great, obviously. Oasis had some bangers. If you're even a generic Oasis fan like me, you're going to hear what you came for. I don't need a documentary to spend 15 minutes on the significance of some B-side from 1994. Give me the songs everybody knows, show me those enormous crowds losing their minds, and let me enjoy it.
I recently saw the Green Day movie and thought that was a great band movie, but it was more of a fan experience built around chasing the band and the tour. This is a more straightforward music documentary, and that's fine. Oasis was one of the premier bands of the '90s and the breakup froze them in time while Liam and Noel went off and had their individual careers, and whatever either of them did separately, it was never Oasis. Seeing them put the thing back together, and seeing what it meant to the people who had been waiting on it, is enough. The filmmakers had tremendous access and milked it for everything it was worth, and the music alone is going to sound better in a theater than it ever will out of your television.