Oasis got an eight-minute ovation in Venice. The documentary is softer than either brother would admit.

Noel Gallagher spent part of Saturday evening wiping his eyes, which is not a sentence anybody expected to write about him. Oasis: Don't Look Back In Anger had just had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, and the room stayed on its feet for eight minutes.

Liam looked at his watch. According to Variety he mouthed "should we fuck off?" at his brother, and Steven Knight, who created the film, talked him into staying. Then the two of them held hands and put them in the air. It was the first time they had appeared together in public off a stage since the reunion began. They skipped the press conference afterwards, so that is the whole record of the evening: the ovation, and the film.

What you are actually going to see

Two hours, directed by Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace. If you know their names it is from Shut Up and Play the Hits, the LCD Soundsystem film, and Meet Me in the Bathroom. That matters, because both of those are about what a band feels like from the inside rather than what it looks like from the crowd, and this one works the same way. Steven Knight, of Peaky Blinders, created and wrote it.

It is not a history of Oasis. It is about Live '25 and almost nothing else: rehearsal rooms, corridors, the walk to the stage, and concert footage drawn from twelve of the forty-one shows. Knebworth appears in short inserts rather than as a chapter. Do not go in expecting the nineties.

The reason to watch it is the talking. Both brothers sat down for it, and the official synopsis calls these their first joint interviews in over twenty years. The film is built around how two people who did not speak for fifteen years ended up on the same stage again, and Knight has said in Venice that the subject is reconciliation. Their children come up as part of why it happened at all, which is the sort of thing neither of them has ever discussed on the record.

Why it is going down well

The reviews are strong and the note they keep hitting is the same one: it is far more tender than a film about these two has any right to be. Time Out gave it five stars. The Hollywood Reporter called it rich and poignant. The Guardian gave it four. IndieWire landed on a B. For a band whose entire public life has been shaped by two men refusing to be soft in front of each other, a documentary in which they are soft is the whole event.

It is not unanimous. Variety went the other way entirely, calling the earnestness clumsy and forced and the film little more than a cash grab. Worth knowing before you buy a ticket, because if the sentiment does not land for you there is not a second layer underneath it.

It is in IMAX from 9 September, in cinemas from the 11th, and on Disney+ later this year. See it in a room with other people if you can. On the evidence of Saturday, the singing along is part of it.

One odd absence

For a film that is specifically about 2025, the thing most people argued about that year is not in it. When Live '25 went on sale, standing tickets advertised at £148.50 were being sold for £355.20 by the time fans reached the front of the queue, and the Competition and Markets Authority opened an investigation that ran for a year. Ticketmaster gave formal undertakings last September, without any admission of wrongdoing.

Time Out was the one review to name the omission, calling it the elephant in the room. It sits oddly next to what the film keeps returning to, which is where the brothers came from: a council house on Cranwell Drive in Burnage, where their mother still lives. The film makes that its emotional centre, and then leaves out the part where getting into the reunion cost people like that a week's wages.

Where the band is now

Live '25 finished on 23 November last year at the Estádio do Morumbi in São Paulo, forty-one shows across fourteen countries. There are no 2026 dates. Noel told talkSPORT this month that "there's no football tournament next summer, so we've got to do something in the summer, right?", which is as close as anyone has come to an announcement. Nothing is confirmed and the schedules going round online are rumour. New music is not coming either. Liam, in São Paulo: "I'm quite happy singing the old stuff. New music is for wankers."

The last summer of one Gallagher

Shooting a Gallagher was on our list for years. We got Liam at Sziget on 9 August 2024, in Budapest, on a stage with his own name on it and no brother anywhere near it. Eighteen days later the reunion was announced and none of that was true any more.

Nobody in that field knew. He did, presumably. We would like to get the two of them in front of a lens together one day, because whatever anyone thinks of the ticket prices or the interviews or the eight minutes of applause, those songs are not coming out of music history. They are in it.

Photographs: @colindarbyshir3 and @annnlies, Sziget Festival, August 2024.