According to Oasis’ Liam Gallagher, “you have to fucking care a lot to not give a fuck.” It’s one of many profanity-laced quotes from the usually-unfiltered frontman in Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger, the new rock documentary from writer Steven Knight and directors Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace. For their massive “Oasis Live ’25” reunion tour, Gallagher had to be on his best behavior — something emphasized by Gallagher’s quiet stalk in the rehearsal room, his sour disposition, and his quote confessing that he would not be smoking or drinking throughout the duration of the run.
Oasis’ story is much less clean-cut. Their original run was marked by high highs and very low lows, with plenty of debauchery and fiery exchanges between the Gallagher brothers across a 15-year period. Now, Liam and Noel almost seem apologetic to their fans for being so mired in the bullshit. Speaking in their first interview together in 20 years, the famously embattled brothers now flatter each other and express mutual respect. It’s one of the core features of the new doc: Thanks to the outpouring of love throughout their reunion run, Liam and Noel’s pettiness has been put in perspective. Everything’s peachy now — or is it?
The Reunion Tour
The answer is a bit more complicated. It’s easy to look at the cynical side of Oasis’ reunion, which has a lot less to do with the fans who’ve carried the torch for them and more with how lucrative it was. As Liam reminds us during an onstage speech, “there are no cheap seats, sorry about that.” The doc also notably skips over the period from their 2009 breakup to their 2024-25 reunion, where Liam and Noel toured Oasis material with their respective solo projects — albeit to smaller rooms than those featured on the “Oasis Live ’25” run.
Still, it’d be silly to expect Don’t Look Back in Anger to linger on the fact that their reunion tour grossed over $400 million and allowed Liam and Noel a level of financial security that also put their years-long beef in perspective. Given that this film will eventually land on Disney+ — not to mention the all-but-confirmed 2027 Oasis reunion tour dates — Knight, Southern, and Lovelace keep things as earnest as possible and focus on the optimism of the band’s return. This is a film about forgiveness between the brothers, yes, but more importantly, it’s about the fans that made this reunion a cultural phenomenon.
The Fans
There’s a large chunk of screen time devoted to figures around the world who have been impacted by Oasis’ music: a Brazilian fan who has named her dog Bonehead after Oasis guitarist Paul Arthurs, two South Korean deep-sea divers who’ve bonded over the themes on “Acquiesce”, an emotional River Plate fan in Argentina who sees himself in the Gallaghers’ working-class image, a survivor of the 2017 Manchester bombing who has found new meaning in “Don’t Look Back in Anger”. More than the Gallaghers themselves, these figures are the root of the film — the reminder that as short-sighted as Liam and Noel were and can still be, the music they made has grown much larger than their own egos.
This is an aspect enhanced by the plethora of crowd shots and footage from the band’s various stadium shows last summer. There are so many cathartic sequences depicting people under the age of 30 singing, laughing, crying. Noel even admits that he wasn’t expecting so many young people to be at these shows, which tracks given that his High Flying Birds shows just a few years prior were closer to Gen-X nostalgia blasts.
The Music
Noel’s assessment is true: Oasis’ music has been passed down from the Gallaghers’ generation to mine, and in the process, taken on a new meaning about living life to the fullest and relishing in the now-rare experience of collective joy. The doc makes its own case for why that experience feels so urgent now, especially to the younger generations: a brief montage tracks Oasis’ fallow years through Trump, the January 6th insurrection, Elon Musk, and a revolving door of UK Prime Ministers, set to a voiceover — presumably Liam’s — flatly noting that “when Oasis broke up, everything went to shit.” Noel is more direct about it: people needed “an escape,” and that need is a big part of why the reunion tour became the cultural event, not just the music itself.
This ethos is reflected in the film’s most sentimental shot, where a young fan stands bewildered and in tears at the show’s conclusion, taking in the fact that what he just experienced was a sort of life-changing high. Appropriately, he’s seen and comforted by two men (presumably strangers), who appear to know exactly how precious that emotion is. Knight, Southern, and Lovelace know it too.
Through this lens, Don’t Look Back in Anger functions much better as a concert film than a documentary. Liam and Noel’s revelations about the tour and their respective experiences aren’t exactly revelatory; their most emotional reckoning really comes with the discussion of Mani, the late Stone Roses bassist and Manchester music icon who died shortly before one of Oasis’ shows in Brazil. Noel also discusses how his children had never really met or spent time with Liam’s children, and for the first time ever, there’s a real emphasis on family in the Oasis dynamic. It seems that the bitterness between them is waning, which is a great thing. But as documentary fodder, it’s much less compelling than the visceral, emotionally purgative nature of the shows themselves.
And boy, were those shows powerful. As someone who attended “Oasis Live ’25” in New Jersey, reliving my experience via this documentary was incredibly moving, and even if I hadn’t gone, I would have still been moved by the raw emotion depicted. Hearing the songs — which are immaculately mixed, I might add — with the booming echo of the crowd behind them was just further proof that this music was meant to be belted as a collective.
Even with its Disney-shaped happy ending, and against the backdrop of everything Liam says “went to shit,” it’s hard not to surrender to the beauty of seeing these people finally get to have their drunken Oasis sing-along, to finally be the “Rock ‘n’ Roll Star,” to feel like they will “Live Forever,” if only for a couple of hours. Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger may not fully reckon with the cynicism of a $400 million victory lap, but it doesn’t really need to: the point was never really the Gallaghers’ redemption. It’s that thousands of strangers cared enough, together, in one room, to make it feel like family.
Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger hits select theaters on Friday, September 11th and will stream on Disney+ later this year.
Pixel P. Snarkbyte, widely regarded as the “Shakespeare of Sh*tposts,” is a video game expert with a unique knack for turning pixels into punchlines.
Born in the small town of Respawn, Pennsylvania, Pixel grew up mashing buttons on an ancient NES controller, firmly believing that “blowing into the cartridge” was a sacred ritual passed down through generations.
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