Oasis Reunion Doc Premieres at Venice Film Festival — SkimNews
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- "Oasis: Don't Look Back in Anger" premiered out of competition at the Venice Film Festival, directed by Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace, written by Steven Knight, with a 2-hour-2-minute runtime and world sales handled by Disney.
- The documentary documents the Gallagher brothers' reunion world stadium tour, which the review calls "perhaps one of the most crazily oversubscribed reunion tours" in UK history, but "the great mystery" of why they reconciled is never addressed.
- Paul "Bonehead" Arthurs, absent from Oasis since 1999, is presented as the missing piece — his "elephantine guitar grind" restored the band's sound, which Blur had reportedly mocked by dubbing the post-Bonehead version "(Status) Quoasis," a critique Noel acknowledges.
- The Cardiff opener drew a crowd police compared to a football match, with one fan calling the reunion "like the rebirth of Christ, or something," while Liam arrived at rehearsal after Noel openly doubted he would show up.
- Oasis's enduring draw is traced to just two of their seven albums — 1994's "Definitely Maybe" and "(What's the Story) Morning Glory?" — which the review credits with sustaining an international fandom that fills stadiums three decades later.
- The review flags structural weaknesses: at two hours it's "a long haul if you're not a fan," padded with "lots of unnecessary chats with fans" and repetitive scenes of the Gallaghers reiterating their astonishment at the comeback, while their mother Peggy is "curiously absent."
Why it matters: With world sales at Disney, this becomes the official film record of one of the UK's biggest recent music events, but the review's biggest reveal is an editorial choice: the film treats the Gallaghers' reconciliation as sacred rather than interrogated — a "divine force" and a priest's sermon on forgiveness stand in for any actual answer. That means paying audiences and future biographers get the spectacle of 90,000-strong crowds but no insight into the psychology that reunited the brothers after their 2009 Rock en Seine implosion.
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