'Oasis: Don't Look Back in Anger' Review: An Electric Account of Music's Biggest Reunion
By Dan Bremner - September 16, 2026
The hybrid documentary/concert film charting the colossal return of Oasis on their 2025 reunion tour. I’m not the die-hard Oasis obsessive most of my friends are. I like them a lot and think they have an outstanding run of bangers, but I’ve never lived and breathed the band. I am, however, always up for a music documentary. Like Charlie Whale attempting a diet, I failed miserably to get tickets for the reunion shows (here’s hoping the teased second leg works out better). Seeing this in IMAX felt like the next best option available.
Directed by Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern and written by Steven Knight, what you get is an electric account of the tour that captures the pure scale and awe of the comeback, delivers a stack of greatest-hits performances, and reminds you how naturally funny Liam and Noel still are. It doesn’t dig as deep as I’d hoped into the fractured Gallagher relationship, and it spends a little too long on fans pouring their hearts out, but the overall experience remains incredibly entertaining.
The film is an unapologetically triumphant celebration of the Live ’25 tour. It focuses on the size, energy and cultural weight of one of the biggest rock reunions in recent memory (I genuinely think the only thing that could possibly be bigger is if Michael Jackson somehow came back to life and toured again) and largely refuses to dwell on the years of bad blood, as it's firmly okay with letting it all be water under the bridge. As a record of the event itself, it is effective and frequently impressive
There is a real emotional charge here. The joy of the live shows is constantly layered with the knowledge of time passing and the fact that the brothers had not shared a stage in over fifteen years. Even as someone who isn’t a superfan, I found stretches of it unexpectedly moving. The combination of mass singalongs, shared crowd enthusiasm and quieter moments of reflection lands more often than it misses. The way Liam knows how to get the crowd going is quite something.
One of the film’s most distinctive choices is how much time it gives to the audience. Fans of every age and from multiple countries (UK, Ireland, Brazil, South Korea, the US, Japan and beyond) are shown weeping, hugging strangers, dancing and generally losing themselves in the music. The film makes a clear case that Oasis tracks have functioned as a kind of communal soundtrack for resilience and nostalgia across generations and cultures. At times this focus becomes slightly repetitive (there's only so many times you need to see people crying over the news they're seeing Oasis again or for the first time), but the best of these sequences carry genuine power, especially one focusing on a survivor of the 2017 Manchester Arena Bombing.
The concert footage itself is a major strength. Shot by a strong team of cinematographers (including Lol Crawley), the performances look and sound excellent in IMAX. Liam’s vocals hold up well, the band sounds heavy and precise, and the big anthems like “Don’t Look Back in Anger,” “Live Forever”, “Champagne Supernova” and the rest arrive with full stadium force. The communal singing is captured in a way that makes the size of the events feel so big, and the utter scale of the hundreds of thousands of fans all locked-in is staggering. Production values are high throughout. The film looks cinematic, moves at a breathless pace across its two-hour runtime, and makes strong use of the IMAX frame. As pure concert documentary craft, it is well above average. Above all, it only helped reinforce that I missed out dearly on a piece of music history that I will never have the chance to capture. As is life.
The Gallaghers themselves remain of good value. Liam and Noel are still witty, foul-mouthed and larger than life, and their natural banter provides necessary levity. Liam somehow still looks like a rock star while Noel has fully completed his transformation into the kind of middle-aged dad you’d see browsing emulsion in B&Q on a Sunday morning. Most importantly, they appear to have finally sorted those awful, awful early-days eyebrows.
The limitations are obvious once you realise what this is, and it seems pretty clear this is a fluff piece. The film deliberately soft-pedals the hard history. The causes of the brothers’ long estrangement, the details of the 2009 split, and the actual negotiations that made the reunion possible are left largely unexamined. Noel’s bad back that led to him missing several weeks of rehearsals, the children meeting for the first time, and any lingering tension are acknowledged only in passing. It presents a clean “water under the bridge” narrative that feels incomplete if you wanted insight rather than celebration. In that sense it functions more as authorised fan-service and high-end concert souvenir than as a probing documentary. The Disney/Hulu connection only underlines the polished, risk-averse tone. It prioritises euphoria and goodwill over anything negative.
It also completely ignores the Ticketmaster mess, the flawed, predatory ticket distribution, the dynamic pricing, and the way large numbers of fans were locked out by inflated costs. For a band that has always traded on a working-class, anti-establishment image, the omission is glaring. I could have really done with 5 minutes less of fans crying their eyes out and maybe touched on that a little.
Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger is an electric, well-made, emotionally effective record of a massive cultural moment that stops short of exploring much negative confrontation. As a concert film and a celebration it works. As a documentary about the Gallaghers feud and what it actually took to get this reunion to happen, you won't find that here. What you get is a highly entertaining, incredibly filmed display of their phenomenal impact, humour and music that was impossible not to get taken by. F**k Ticketmaster.
'Oasis: Don't Look Back in Anger' released in cinemas on September 9, 2026.
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Dan Bremner
Writer
Dan is a writer from Guildford with a love for all things genre, schlocky, and thoroughly '80s, and a part-time philanthropist.
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