Dylan Southern takes music fans seriously, and his work with Will Lovelace understands the pleasure of seeing a band together again. We like that generosity, though their Oasis film is too willing to leave important questions alone.
Fi1m perspective
In Oasis: Don't Look Back in Anger (2026), fans explain where the band's songs fit into their lives, and Dylan Southern and co-director Will Lovelace let them talk. We were moved by their accounts, which explained the excitement without assuming we shared a lifelong attachment to the band. The people buying tickets have their own reasons for caring about a reunion. Southern and Lovelace are right to give those reasons space. It is an enjoyable concert documentary that makes the occasion matter even to viewers who were not waiting for it.
Southern's early music documentaries included No Distance Left to Run (2010), about Blur's reunion. Shut Up and Play the Hits (2012) documented LCD Soundsystem in concert, while Meet Me in the Bathroom (2022) adapted an oral history of the early-2000s New York indie scene. His frequent partnership with Lovelace has emphasised live performance and access to musicians away from the stage. These subjects invite nostalgia before a director has done anything, so the useful question is what the films offer someone who was not there.
The Thing with Feathers (2025) marked a change: Southern wrote and directed his first narrative feature, a novel adaptation starring Benedict Cumberbatch. Some reviews found that conventional filmmaking struggled to accommodate the source material's experimental style. That is a different difficulty from knowing when to leave musicians alone with a camera running. His return to music documentaries with the Oasis film gives us firmer grounds for recommending his work, without settling what he might achieve in fiction.
For the Oasis rehearsals, Southern and Lovelace favoured unobtrusive filming that would let the band carry on without interference. The restraint suits a film carried by the songs, the brothers' humour and the pleasure of seeing Liam and Noel on stage together. But their reconciliation is accepted rather than examined, and the directors let the fan testimony grow repetitive. A shorter run of interviews and more enquiry would have helped. See it for the performances and the fans, not for an explanation of how the reunion became possible.
Biography
Dylan Southern is an English film director and writer, often working in partnership with Will Lovelace. He began his career with music documentaries, including No Distance Left to Run (2010) about Blur, which received a Grammy nomination for Best Long Form Music Video, and Shut Up and Play the Hits (2012) about LCD Soundsystem.
Southern co-directed the music documentary Meet Me in the Bathroom (2022) and the comedy special Aziz Ansari: Buried Alive (2013). His first narrative feature, The Thing with Feathers (2025), starred Benedict Cumberbatch. He co-directed the 2026 documentary Oasis: Don't Look Back in Anger about the band's reunion tour.
