The Lido in Venice has seen plenty of star power on its film festival red carpet. George Clooney is a frequent fixture, Julia Roberts flashed her pearly whites here last year, and Robert Pattinson dazzled on Saturday afternoon.

That same evening, there was a different kind of celebrity, an irreverent energy that hasn’t always melded with the glamorous surroundings.

Noel and Liam Gallagher brought their Mancunian swagger to Venice, but they were on their best behaviour. Refined stardom, not ferry brawls - a relief given Venice’s over abundance of water craft.

Two years on from the announcement of Oasis’s reformation, the Gallaghers were there to present Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger, the documentary that tracked the band’s sold-out 2025 reunion tour.

If fans have been looking for clues that there now exists a genuine affection between the former feuders, there were plenty on display.

They arrived on the same flight and signed autographs on their way out of the airport, and shared a famed Venetian water taxi to the photo call.

At the premiere, they joked around, whispered to each other, smiled, their body language more relaxed than it was on tour. Every time they leaned in together, or grasped their hands in triumph, the fans behind the barricades screamed louder.

Noel and Liam even snuck out of the screening together, thick as thieves in the dark, just as the opening montage was rolling, before returning five minutes from the end, and rising from their seats to the rapturous standing ovation.

For all the Gallaghers’ decorum, that was still a little bit rock-and-roll - in Venice, the stars generally sit and stay through the whole film.

This scenario of brotherly love seemed impossible not long ago, and the doco is another chapter in rewriting the narrative of Oasis.

Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger is part documentary, part concert film and part public reconciliation, not just with each other but with their fans. It’s about putting back together the compact they ripped up when the brothers’ relationship imploded in 2009.

For believers, the doc, directed by Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern, and written by Steven Knight, captures the euphoria that pervaded throughout the 2025 tour, which included five dates across Sydney and Melbourne.

In stadiums across the world, longtime, new and multi-generational fans came together. They sang, they cried and for those two hours and change, it was like being in a different world.

If Noel and Liam could reunite after 15 years of animosity, then anything could happen.

That might seem like hyperbole to outsiders, but what that tour represented was the optimism that ran through a swathe of Oasis songs from a former era. A sense that if you f....d up today, tomorrow will still come.

Premiering at the Venice Film Festival ahead of its cinema release this week, Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger takes its cue from the song.

It’s a story about acknowledging the past but moving forward without resentment. It’s a purging, a catharsis.

Of course, the question, even among fans, was how much of this rapprochement is authentic and how much of it is for show. The financial rewards of the tour were undeniable - it grossed $US405 million ($563m AUD), according to Pollstar.

The brothers are generous about each other. Gone are the potato-based verbal sledges, replaced with a renewed (or maybe newfound) respect for the other’s talents.

Noel’s appraisal of Liam is now, “F....g hell, you absolute f....g mad c..t” in the best possible way while Liam marvels that Noel’s songwriting tapped into something transcendent.

It toys with tension - Liam is barely a presence during rehearsals, in and out like a bandit, while Noel admits to nerves and wonders aloud if it’ll fall apart - but we know it all worked out. There were no reports of behind-the-scenes tantrums.

So the real story here is maybe not the juicy expose some had hoped for - what really happened in 2009, how did the past 16 years play out, did mum Peggy really go on tour with them to keep the peace? Those answers are not here.

The film is a love-in, a love for the band, a love for the fans, a love for the music.

The fandom is the second main character here, and the filmmakers spend a lot of time with various people in different cities - a woman diver in Korea, a young fan from Manchester, the 80,000 Irish fans singing Luke Kelly’s The Auld Triangle, the Argentinian man who meshed his own culture into Wonderwall and the young non-verbal boy whose favourite song is Talk Tonight.

There’s even a police briefing before the first show in Cardiff where the boss-man drops four Oasis song titles into his pep talk. He apologises for the puns.

There’s an English minister who speaks to his congregation about the “pilgrimage” of fans he spotted in their bucket hats and parkas on their way to the concert, which he sees as an act of forgiveness and healing.

The Gallaghers have both mellowed out over the years, striking a more conciliatory tone although Liam maintains that cheeky lad attitude even when he says he’s over his own bulls..t.

When he tells the audience to “don’t be a c..t”, he adds, but “if you’re going to be a c..t, be a funny c..t”. It’s not change but evolution. As Noel says, Liam will always be himself, and it’s taken them years to realise they need to go to him, not the other way around.

There’s a slickness to the documentary in that you’re not going to see or hear anything the Gallaghers don’t want you to see or hear. But it’s not exactly hagiography in a traditional sense.

Gone are the arrogant proclamations or spiky provocations of their youth, which pop up in flashback clips. Liam says that he’s not a superhero, just a guy in a band, but recognises that Oasis does mean something to a lot of people.

Where the temptation might have been 30 years ago to take all the credit for themselves, to be the biggest rock and roll stars in the world, the Gallaghers, who sat down together for an on-camera interview, include in “us” and “we” the fandom.

Of course, there is the effect of pedestal-ing when the filmmakers cut to the fans, because the Gallaghers are the focal point of all that adoration. But it genuinely feels more like an embrace than an ego trip.

The camera often holds on a face in the crowd at one of the concerts, beaming with jubilation as they belt out the lyrics they’ve sung a thousand times, voices drowned in the collective.

But the moments that have the most punch are not during the gig but afterwards. There are young men overcome with emotion, awed and unable to move as the lights come on and the crowd thins out, still in disbelief at the experience.

Noel admits that he often turned his back to the audience because he would catch sight of a father-and-son in the audience, and get choked up.

Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger’s greatest accomplishment is persuasively selling the feeling that every one of those two million people who bought a ticket to one of the 41 shows shared in something extraordinary.

For those outside the cult, the film will feel long and repetitive.

There are loads of extended sequences of the concerts, and if you were in one of those stadiums, heart pumping, face beaming, then it’s the closest to being back there.

That is until, surely, the next Oasis tour.

Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger is in cinemas on September 10