Oh brother: "Don't Look Back in Anger"

So it goes. Blur reunite, successfully, and document the occasion with not one but three separate documentaries. Oasis do likewise, no less successfully, and go as far as to hire the directors of Blur's first and best comeback movie (Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern, late of 2010's No Distance Left To Run) to put them up on the big screen. Is nothing the Gallaghers do original? Don't Look Back in Anger opens with a "previously on Oasis" potted history: the supersonic - nay, stratospheric - launch and success, the tabloid feeding frenzy, the wibbling rivalry, the thousand-yard glares and stares, the bust-ups, "The Hindu Times", the semi-inevitable split (announced on stage in Paris by a heroic fonctionnaire who advises the jeering fans to log onto oasis.com to find out more), the far less potent solo projects (yielding literally one good song over sixteen years), the years of stubbornness, the will-they-won't-they, the rising plumes of nostalgia stoked by such docs as 2016's Supersonic and 2019's Liam Gallagher: As It Was and the scenes after every recent England football victory. It was, after all, the songs that persisted. Scrappy, patchwork beerhall and terrace anthems, really no more lyrically meaningful than, say, Andrew WK's "Party Hard", their very porousness proved a virtue, and indeed Oasis's saving grace: these circuits were only fully completed once The People™ started to sing or howl along with them, their integral retroness allowing everybody to reconnect with some half-forgotten, perhaps even non-existent heyday. She's electric. He's electric. Together, we are only more electric. At some point in the long and drawn-out reunion process, that's what Noel and Liam - two individuals famously not given to reflection - began to realise themselves. And gradually, unexpectedly, Lovelace and Southern's film itself becomes electric, too.

It takes a while, granted, and there are stretches where the emotional current flows brighter and more freely than it does elsewhere. At its strongest - and as with No Distance Left to Run before it - DLBIA functions as an event-cinema study in modern British masculinity, swapping in bluff Manc lads for effete Essex art-schoolers. When Liam finally shows up at the rehearsal rooms, it's as a parka-contained cloud of displaced grievances, refusing to address his brother directly, getting in a huff with some innocent drum baffles, tearing the plastic cap off one of those woke water bottles they have nowadays. We knew things were bad; Lovelace and Southern show us how bad things could be when one brother or another had a right cob on. For a while here, it's touch-and-go, strictly business: this first day of rehearsals as the Oasis of old ends with Liam swaggering out of the room before his bandmates can even bring "Champagne Supernova" to an end, Noel offering an older brother's sage nod that seems to say "let him go". The techies look on nervily. How can this possibly work over the course of one gig, let alone a whole world tour? It's the songs, of course. It was always the songs. On the soundtrack, one unidentified Gallagher - probably Liam, but as with most siblings, their voices tend to merge - insists he's sworn off the drink because the songs demand that level of respect. (We don't hear "The Hindu Times".) Suddenly, Noel and Liam are recast as an estranged couple having to put their interpersonal differences aside for the benefit of their offspring, in this case their musical legacy. And as the tour plays out, that wibbling rivalry is transformed into a sibling synergy that falls somewhere between magical and miraculous: now they're on the same stage and the same page - and it doesn't seem quite so absurd when the directors cut in a Manchester priest's sermon about Jesus telling Peter to forgive his brother. They may not be Biblical, but one can draw lessons from these events.

Inevitably, some of the old familiar hubris remains in place. We hear Liam opining that Oasis's splitting was responsible for the world going to hell in a handcart, as Lovelace and Southern lay on a montage encompassing Brexit, Trump, Johnson, Musk and Covid. (I don't think Oasis splitting was responsible for any of that. Though the older, wiser Noel is heard maintaining Oasis is "not some right-wing thing", I do suspect some of the group's fans might be.) And the film isn't blind to the hyperbole and hoopla that accompanied these gigs: one attendee, a middle-aged man in (not inaptly) a Beatles tee, insists the comeback is on a par with the resurrection of Christ. What's interesting about DLBIA - what makes this by far the strongest Oasis film yet - is that there are stretches where we can't be sure Lovelace and Southern are the biggest Oasis fans, and their ambivalence allows them to take a step back and a good look around; they're not entirely swept up and swept along by proceedings, until the point where they (and we) are. In the meantime, they couldn't help but spot what these gigs meant to the fans, captured in an elevated form of concert-movie portraiture, crying, praying, hugging and - yes - singing. What's more surprising is what these concerts clearly meant to the band: hitherto never the most emotionally expressive individual - unless that emotion was "peeved" - Noel is caught fiddling anxiously around backstage before the first Cardiff gig ("we've got a chance here to fix the narrative"); he appears, by his own admission, in something of a trance as the gig itself plays out; he looks visibly relieved at how well it all went afterwards; and is finally observed with tears in his eyes as he sets about the title song with a new, middle-aged mellowness. There is, after all, so much to look back on, for better and worse.

The concert footage, which starts to dominate from around the halfway mark, will obviously depend on personal tolerance for, say, Liam's gravel-gargling vocal on "Roll With It"; there's still only so much Lovelace and Southern can finesse. And in the second half, you can feel these directors - possibly egged on by writer-producer Steven Knight, who takes a bizarre "created by" credit - giving in and giving the fans what they may ultimately want, even if that's something those fans will likely have already experienced. The extended fan portraits - here a Korean oyster diver who hums "Acquiesce" to herself underwater, there a Brazilian who named her dog after Bonehead - prove far less compelling than whatever was going on in those rehearsal rooms and backstage on this tour; I'll give the directors credit for going international with these segments - it's not all tubby middle-aged men in bucket hats - but they leave DLBIA as a concert film with a terrific opening act, a rousing finale, and some bland filler in between. Still, the plain truth is these shows did fix the pop-cultural narrative, while simultaneously repairing something fundamental to the brothers' relationship. What that middle stretch quietly flags is that nobody in their right mind would pay this much to see Noel performing "Wonderwall" solo (you'd be better off catching Mike Flowers for nowt at the local village fete), but put him on guitar and stick Liam upfront, and you've got something. With newfound humility and self-awareness, they realised they needed one another, too - or at the very least to see one another anew through the eyes of their adoring (and forgiving) crowds. Maybe it's inevitable that the foremost Beatles copyists of our time should have arrived at their own Get Back - but this Get Back wonders what it's like when a band gets back together, and then take whatever message they're carrying to the masses once more. The dates have just been announced for Oasis Live '27, with tickets retailing in the vicinity of £150-200. They will almost certainly sell out within minutes. So it goes.

Don't Look Back in Anger is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

Eye of God: "Leviticus"

The ongoing horror renaissance here brings off something genuinely radical: installing an unabashedly queer chiller at the heart of the multiplex. (Last month's Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma felt intrinsically arthouse, and not much of a horror movie in the end; and although certain corners of the Internet might long for it, I still think you have to do a fair bit of critical heavy lifting to draw 1987's A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors out of its much-discussed closet.) Australian writer-director Adrian Chiarella's Leviticus puts at its centre two gay teenagers attempting to hide their love from their elders in a small industrial town. It's a small Australian industrial town, to be more specific, pulling us back into the rough-and-ready territory of 2022's Talk to Me. As we first join them, young Ryan (Stacy Clausen) and Naim (Joe Bird) are watching a Biblical serpent devour a frog in the fields surrounding their tumbledown home; later, they'll break into one of the area's many abandoned factories to lob stones at one another. They're at the displacement stage of young love, where desire tends to manifest as horseplay and roughhousing - although a full-mouthed kiss, one pinning the other down on the factory floor, would appear to signal this displacement is no more. But this is also, to further specify, a small, predominantly Christian town, which both explains that looming title - Naim's mother Arlene (Mia Wasikowska) is a big deal in the local revivalist church - and why these boys feel they have to keep their affections secret. Some people out this way would consider such affections unnatural. But they're nothing like as unnatural as what follows: a Judas-like betrayal, a spell in conversion therapy overseen by a steely-eyed Nicholas Hope (from 1993's Bad Boy Bubby) and the emergence of a new threat that turns these boys against one another, once more leaving them feeling watched, judged, hounded.

Leviticus is one of those rare horror films that feels broadly original even as it encompasses elements you may well have encountered elsewhere. Conversion therapy, for one, was central to the recent Oz-shot, US-set streaming title Diabolic; we also get an unexpected revival for that classic expositionary scene in which our harried heroes have to track down a mental patient with close personal knowledge of how their demons operate. Yet Chiarella's assured storytelling takes these staples in its stride, and he's eloquent indeed in his shotmaking. That dreamy prologue, for starters, establishes a wordless contrast between the wide open skies and spaces Ryan and Naim are framed against and the cold, dark houses of God the boys' elders retreat inside; thereafter, an altogether oppressive atmosphere takes hold. Accusatory glances are fired from the pulpit and the pews; the youngsters are penned in by pylons and wires, unable to communicate as they would prefer; and Jed Kurzel's score, scattering unresolved notes and tensions, keeps threatening to fuse with the opening moments of Dire Straits' "Money for Nothing". Quite some threat, then, even if the real demons here are shame and self-loathing, threats from within. As a result, Leviticus maybe doesn't have the blunt-force impact of other recent Aussie breakouts, but it's quietly impressive all the same, both as horror and as a film. Chiarella proceeds with a scuffed-up sincerity that manifests wherever you look: in his gripping and unnerving narrative developments, forever rooted in painful human experience; in his largely analogue effects work, specialising in trauma registered on bodies and faces; and in the Gregory Crewdson-like eye DoP Tyson Perkins displays for distressed and dishevelled locations. This shouldn't be the ultimate horror litmus test, but you sense Leviticus would work almost as well without its central supernatural conceit - as a latter-day parable on the evils men are perfectly capable of doing unto themselves.

Leviticus is now showing in selected cinemas.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of September 4-6, 2026):

1 (1) Spider-Man: Brand New Day (12A) ***

2 (2) The Odyssey (15) ***

3 (3) Insidious: Out of the Further (15)

4 (10) Toy Story 5 (PG) **

5 (6) The End of Oak Street (12A) ***

6 (11) Minions & Monsters (U)

7 (new) The Death of Robin Hood (15)

8 (5) The Dog Stars (15)

9 (4) Coyote vs. ACME (PG) ***

10 (8) Paw Patrol: The Dino Movie (U)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Raiders of the Lost Ark

2. La Femme Infidèle/The Unfaithful Wife

3. Don't Look Back in Anger

4. Leviticus

5. Shaun the Sheep: Farmageddon

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Toy Story 5 (PG) **

2 (2) Obsession (18) *

3 (3) Minions & Monsters (U)

4 (4) Michael (12)

5 (5) jackass: best and last (18)

6 (6) The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (PG)

7 (re) 28 Days Later... (15) ****

8 (18) Supergirl (12)

9 (8) Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu (12)

10 (15) Tuner (15) ***

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Power Ballad

2. Rose of Nevada

3. The Stranger

4. Tuner

5. Passenger

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Saint Omer (Saturday, BBC Two, 1.50am)

2. Lawrence of Arabia [above] (Saturday, BBC Two, 1.30pm)

3. The Innocents (Thursday, Channel 4, 2am)

4. Back to the Future Part II (Sunday, BBC One, 2.50pm)

5. Moonage Daydream (Friday, Channel 4, 1.20am)

Indy revival: "Raiders of the Lost Ark"

This back-to-front, Benjamin Button-ass movie summer began with substandard Spielberg; it closes with a reminder of the young master operating somewhere close to his peak. In those rare moments of downtime in 1981's Raiders of the Lost Ark, you may start wondering which of this filmmaker's early works still affords you the most pleasure, the biggest thrill: if forced at gunpoint, I'd probably take the cosmic wonder of Close Encounters and the crisp perfection of E.T. over a film that was always intended as homage - although Raiders endures as a homage that, in qualitative terms, far outstripped its tatty and yellowing inspirations. It was a team effort, the product of a Movie Brats brains trust: script by Lawrence Kasdan from a story by George Lucas and Philip Kaufman, turned over to Spielberg to bring to life with a team of studio-raised craft veterans and emergent leading man Harrison Ford as a new kind of hero. Academic in term time, adventurer off the clock, the Indiana Jones introduced here was the kind of unflustered multidisciplinary gadabout his bookish and bespectacled West Coast creators dreamt of some day being, a man who looked good whether in tweedy jacket or wielding a whip. (One early, especially sharp Spielberg touch: the cutaway to the goo-goo-eyed young women in our hero's lecture theatre, paying notably more attention to Dr. Jones's jawline than they are to his words.)

In the 45 years since, we've seen more than our fair share of Hollywood throwbacks: strained attempts to recreate some formative corner of a creative's childhood bedroom, many of which never came to life, some of which should have remained in mothballs. Why did this one click so? Obviously it helped to have a generational filmmaking talent who knew exactly where to put the camera to get the best out of any given set-up, but Spielberg had also grasped, from an early point, that event movies are as sharks: they have to keep moving forward, otherwise they wither and perish. Just as Indy reaches for his gun when faced with an opponent waving a big sword around, Spielberg understood the advantages of keeping things simple and cracking on. Raiders is the story of two people - Indy and his on-off lover Marion (Karen Allen, arguably this director's greatest heroine) - who go looking for a thing, hoping to get to the thing before some other people (in this instance, Nazis) get to the thing. True, they will search for it here, there and everywhere; the movie did as much as any other to re-establish audience fondness for those interstitial sequences showing planes flying over hand-drawn maps, themselves a way of hurrying matters along. But the pair's quest would be framed in the quick-read fashion of comic-book panels, throwing up daffy images in their wake: the giant rolling boulder, the sieg-heiling monkey, the bad dates, the spiders and the snakes. One revelation from this latest rewatch: how much sudden, violent death there is here. The PG-rated entertainment of your youth now truly seems to earn its new 12A certificate - while also hinting at how the 1980s blockbuster had internalised the carnage of the previous decade's cinema: it's just these directors weren't fashioning auteurist statements so much as rollercoaster rides. We need not mourn the Nazi brute splattered by his own Messerschmidt, but the sequence is notable as one of the few kills in Raiders where Spielberg operates by suggestion.

The bigger picture is a grand triumph of art and production design. One reason Spielberg is operating at such speed is that, like a child on Christmas Eve, he simply cannot wait to uncover and play with the choice gifts he'd been provided with: the booby-trapped cave systems, the tombs within tombs, the bazaars and archaeological digs, the various knick-knacks and tchotchkes that drive this plot (and drive these characters crazy). Scorsese had to turn to cocaine to get this high; his contemporary was giddy on filmmaking alone, and it's that very giddiness that still sweeps us up. Raiders is visibly pricier than the cheapjack Saturday-morning serials that inspired it: Spielberg was getting better and better at putting his budget up on screen (without any of the fuss of, say, a Coppola or Cimino) and allowing his audience to feel they were getting their money's worth, even after - especially after - they'd bought into a dimestore plot. The action here is better than that of those serials, as are the stunts, as is the romantic element; in the desert scenes, John Williams' score achieves the same expansive effect as Maurice Jarre's score for Lean's Lawrence of Arabia. (The frame seems to get bigger with every note.) The principal charge levelled against Spielberg's early films by leaden-faced critics - that they're no more than juvenilia, a lavish recreation of something half-remembered - probably sticks: the climactic face-melting is obviously very different from the deaths filmed for Schindler's List and Munich, the final flourish of a teenage gorehound who sat pop-eyed before the transformation sequences in mid-century monster movies. But - as we all now know - he would grow up and turn his camera to more adult concerns. Raiders remains The Young Spielberg's Guide to History, a WW2 picture-book: skipping nimbly around the cultural faux pas and pitfalls of the later Temple of Doom, it's managed to reach cinematic middle-age without losing any of its original sprightliness or charm. The best blockbuster of summer 1981 just became the best blockbuster of summer 2026.

Raiders of the Lost Ark returns to cinemas nationwide tomorrow. 

Anatomy of a murder: "The Unfaithful Wife/La Femme Infidèle"

The flagship film of the BFI's current Claude Chabrol season, 1969's La Femme Infidèle, lures us in: it opens in sundappled soft focus, before allowing the scrutiny of its characters to become harsher by the frame. Insurance broker Charles (Michel Bouquet) lives in apparent bliss on the outskirts of Paris with his wife Hélène (Stéphane Audran), the very model of a lady of leisure, and the couple's bright young son. Darker clouds blow in after Charles discovers Hélène has been spending her leisure time in the arms of another man, yet when he goes to confront her lover, Victor (Maurice Ronet), the conversation is initially very cordial (and decidedly French): the men bond over the body they've shared, and the husband - with a characteristic degree of condescension - blithely dismisses the affair as just another of his wife's so-called "adventures". It's cordial, that is, up until the point Charles feels compelled to take a marble bust to the other man's bonce. Now Chabrol begins to bear down and hone in, hunting something more psychologically revealing: Bouquet's extensive clean-up of the murder scene, undertaken in much the same committed silence as the heist in Rififi, serves to (further) feminise a protagonist already stricken by the nagging doubt he doesn't measure up as a man. Just when you think the film might develop outwards and explore the consequences of this rash act of violence, it instead folds inwards; a later interrogation of the chief suspect takes place over the dinner table, in the family's home and garden. (The sting, when it comes, is that those who slay together usually stay together.) Chabrol relies heavily on a discordant Pierre Jansen/Dominique Zardi score to draw out these characters' mounting mental unrest, but he also picks up on several subtly unsettling signifiers: a lost TV signal, a crucial jigsaw piece going AWOL. Audran's reptilian beauty holds up remarkably well under the duress, while Bouquet's thin-lipped, blandly amenable smile serves to conceal all manner of frustrations and insecurities. Adrian Lyne reheated the premise for the modern multiplex with 2002's Unfaithful, casting Richard Gere and Diane Lane as the husband and wife, but this forensic original remains genuinely fascinating in its froideur.

The Unfaithful Wife/La Femme Infidèle returns to selected cinemas from Friday; the BFI's Chabrol season runs until October 6.

"Knightfall" (Guardian 08/09/26)

Knightfall **

Dir: Ben Fortune. With: Jeanine Nerissa Sothcott, Ian Ogilvy, Nick Moran, Geoffrey Moore. 82 mins. Cert: 15

Proceeding from an old-school titling pun – yes, the heroine goes by the name Ros Knight – the latest from the resourceful microbudget producer Jonathan Sothcott surely has one optimistic eye on filling the void left by the withdrawal of 007 from public life. Here is that gender-flipped Bond some have been seeking: the adventures of a no-nonsense, tough-talking security operative (Jeanine Nerissa Sothcott) tasked with recovering a lethal bioweapon pilfered from a scaled-down Porton Down during the prologue. Everything, in truth, proves a bit reined-in. This austerity actioner spends less on its setpieces than the Broccolis typically have on keeping one Aston Martin refueled; the Sothcotts’ car of choice, emblematically, is the dinkiest of Minis.

So it’s Bond without the attendant glamour, hanging around drizzly marinas and parky-looking country lanes, in dim light that hopefully obscures some of the more obvious budgetary limitations. What money there is here has wisely been spent on human resources, faces who might still look good on the promotional material: a cameoing Michael Paré as a shady Felix Leiter type, Roger Moore’s son Geoffrey as our gal’s understandably worried-looking lover, Nick Moran giving cut-price Colin Firth as a meddling bureaucrat. The pick of the players is a spry, characterful Ian Ogilvy as Ros’s estranged father, helpfully identifying where the real power lies on a chessboard and generally steadying scenes whenever matters seem a bit too threadbare.

Despite the brassy parps of Logan Jones’s score, there’s nothing much to give Eon sleepless nights. Though director Ben Fortune keeps his careworn world-domination plot moving and just this side of coherent, those action scenes don’t build tension so much as deconstruct the very idea of it, setting Sothcott and Ogilvy to plodding around the garden in the dead of night, taking out the gunmen behind the polytunnel; the grand finale involves a Mexican standoff in someone’s front room. What would already have seemed antiquated circa Bourne risks redundancy in the Slow Horses era, where the tattiness is fully costed and integrated. Still, Knightfall holds onto a certain nostalgic charm: a bizarro-world vision of Bond in severely straitened circumstances, armed only with a licence to kill time.

Knightfall will be available to rent via Prime Video from September 11.

Endless poetry: "Late Fame"

Kent Jones' Late Fame puts some seasoning on that old, old "protagonist drawn into arcane society" plot; the twist is that its protagonist is no wide-eyed naif, rather a character who might conceivably be played by 71-year-old Willem Dafoe. Dafoe's Ed Saxburger was briefly acclaimed as a vital new voice in American poetry at the back end of the 1970s - a phase the film positions as just about the last time a poet might have enjoyed any substantial cultural recognition. A fleeting dayplayer in New York's literary avant-garde - someone whose life once brushed up against Burroughs and Ginsberg - Ed now works for the U.S. Post Office, sorting mail: a steady gig far from any limelight, from which he returns to a small, book-lined flat in the outer boroughs. For some viewers, I suspect, this will seem more than enough: Jones's early scene-setting is likely to induce bookshelf envy in devotees of physical media, who will also want to rifle through every copy of the Village Voice Ed has thought to archive. Yet one night Ed comes home to find an earnest, upright young man waiting for him on an adjacent stoop. Introducing himself as Meyers (Edmund Donovan), he claims to be the spokesperson for a group of latter-day bards who've rediscovered Ed's breakthrough anthology "Way Past Go" and now invite this craggy veteran to perform alongside them at an upcoming event. As Ed starts to sit in on this fresh-faced writing group - recalling Perry Benson among the youthful suedeheads of Shane Meadows' This is England - we're left wondering whether this is a second chance, a third act or merely a dead end. His hosts, after all, are dabblers - rich kids with the trust funds and time to play at being bohemian - whereas some part of Ed is, or maybe was, the real thing.

The source is an Arthur Schnitzler novella, relocated to modern-day Bushwick by Coyote vs. ACME screenwriter Samy Burch and critic-turned-director Jones, and this multitude of inputs and influences gives Late Fame an air of unfolding across several mediums simultaneously. It could be an indie film of a 1990s stripe (given Don Fleming's twangy guitar score, it could well be the most Hal Hartleyish indie not to have been directed by Hartley himself); it could also be a layered, detailed novel set at the intersection of culture and capital. At the very least, you can see why this material spoke to Dafoe, whose Wooster Group remain just about the last troupe standing amid the remnants of New York's countercultural fringe, almost impervious to the past five decades of gentrification. This feels like Dafoe's most fully-dimensional role in a while, allowing the actor to play bashful, bemused and flattered, gentlemanly around Ed's younger actress admirer Gloria (Greta Lee); upon re-entering the poetic fray, however, he betrays flashes of his younger self's arrogance and irascibility. He's realising he cannot possibly live up to his new billing; we come to realise how exposure sometimes exposes all the reasons you never made it in the first place. The all-new Ed Saxburger appears chastened by a world that doesn't really understand him, or that he doesn't really understand: a place of electric cars and influencers, where art seems at best a sidebar. In this nostalgists' bohemia, publishers solicit memoirs rather than new work, and even fervent fans react to you as they would a museum piece: the cruellest line in the picture is Gloria telling Ed "you must have been beautiful when you were young". Between them, Burch, Jones and Dafoe secure our sympathies for Saxburger the artist and Ed the man, even if the supporting characters seem less clearly defined, possibly even unknowable. The filmmakers' strengths reside in evoking a particular milieu: there's a lot of a swaddled Dafoe pounding the cold, hard streets, which may well be the making of an artist but doesn't entirely make for a satisfying narrative. What we're getting here are scenes from the art life, a haiku in film form: in its shrugging, self-effacing way, this handsome, cultured, lived-in miniature offers a few more lines of resistance against the book-burning barbarians now amassing elsewhere.

Late Fame is now playing in selected cinemas.